Buco
A lot, loads — the French "beaucoup", delivered to Panama by the Canal.
Related lesson: Panamanian Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Hay buco gente en la fila del banco.
There are loads of people in the bank queue.
Tengo buco sueño, me voy a dormir.
I'm shattered — I'm off to bed.
Ese pelao tiene buco plata y no lo aparenta.
That lad has loads of money and doesn't show it.
What It Actually Means
Buco is mucho — a lot, plenty, loads — and in informal Panamanian it has largely taken over from mucho in speech. Buco calor, buco trabajo, buco gente: it sits in front of a noun and multiplies it, and it does not agree with anything, so there is no buca and no bucas.
Where It Comes From
From French beaucoup, and this is one of the rare Panamanianisms whose route you can actually follow rather than guess at. Panama’s French connection is the Canal: the failed French attempt of the 1880s under de Lesseps, followed by decades of labour migration from the French-speaking Antilles — Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti — into the ports of Colón and the Canal works. Panamanian dictionaries agree on the French source; what nobody has settled is which channel delivered it, metropolitan French from the engineers or the French-lexicon Creole of the workers, where the same word is bokou. Given who did the digging and the talking, the second is the likelier carrier.
How Natives Use It
Constantly, informally, and only in speech — you will not see it in a newspaper except in quotation marks. It stacks happily with the rest of the register: “chuleta, hay buco tráfico” is a completely ordinary Panama City complaint. Some speakers intensify it further with buco buco.
Common Pitfall
It does not travel. Say buco in Bogotá or Mexico City and you will get a blank look — this is a Panamanian word, not a Caribbean one, and one of the sharpest markers there is that the speaker is from Panama. Keep it out of writing and out of anything formal, and remember the grammar: quantities, not qualities.