the.com/cannibal

means A person (or animal) who eats the flesh of its own species.

from Traces back to 'Caníbales,' the Spanish name Columbus and other explorers recorded for the Carib people of the Caribbean, who were rumored — largely through hearsay and prejudice rather than solid evidence — to eat human flesh. The word got folded into Latin as 'Canibalis,' and from there spread into English. So the word for the act was born from the name of a people, filtered through colonial rumor; it's a cousin, linguistically, of 'Caribbean' itself.