A dialectal or regional term of uncertain meaning, possibly related to a type of water bird or a barge-related term (archaic/rare).
Possibly a compound combining 'barge' or 'bar' with 'goose,' or potentially a variant of another dialectal word. The exact etymology is obscure, and the word appears only rarely in historical texts.
Words like 'bargoose' are the deep-sea creatures of English vocabulary—so rare and regional that they might only appear once or twice in all recorded texts, making lexicographers work like detectives to understand their meaning.
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