Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A Cossack chief.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as hetman.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A hetman, or chief of the Cossacks.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun historical A title of Cossack and haidamak leaders of various kinds. The term was also used for the leader of a fisherman artel and of a band of robbers or thieves.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Russian, from South Turkic, leader of an armed band : ata, father + -man, augmentative suff.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Russian атаман.

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Examples

  • His army razed forty-eight Cossack settlements and killed 7,000 people; but later, fearing Ottoman expansionism, Peter allowed a revival — on the condition that Cossacks accept an ataman, or chieftain, appointed by the czar to rule the oblast.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • Renowned as a Cossack leader, Bespalov traces his roots to a seventeenth-century ataman and the Zaporozhian Cossacks immortalized by Gogol in the novel Taras Bulba.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • Renowned as a Cossack leader, Bespalov traces his roots to a seventeenth-century ataman and the Zaporozhian Cossacks immortalized by Gogol in the novel Taras Bulba.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • [ "It does not please us!"] for our three officials: the ataman, the scribe, and the treasurer.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • His army razed forty-eight Cossack settlements and killed 7,000 people; but later, fearing Ottoman expansionism, Peter allowed a revival — on the condition that Cossacks accept an ataman, or chieftain, appointed by the czar to rule the oblast.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • Renowned as a Cossack leader, Bespalov traces his roots to a seventeenth-century ataman and the Zaporozhian Cossacks immortalized by Gogol in the novel Taras Bulba.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • His army razed forty-eight Cossack settlements and killed 7,000 people; but later, fearing Ottoman expansionism, Peter allowed a revival — on the condition that Cossacks accept an ataman, or chieftain, appointed by the czar to rule the oblast.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • [ "It does not please us!"] for our three officials: the ataman, the scribe, and the treasurer.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • [ "It does not please us!"] for our three officials: the ataman, the scribe, and the treasurer.

    Russia's Holy Warriors 2005

  • If the ataman should hear of it, we might get into a scrape, and they also.

    Creatures That Once Were Men, and other stories 2003

Comments

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  • "Among his potential allies were worthies like the murderously anti-Bolshevik Cossack atamans Grigory Semeyonov and Ivan Kalmykov, who each controlled a stretch of Far Eastern railroad line."

    Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier, p 143

    February 11, 2011