Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A Cossack chief. Also called hetman.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Same as hetman.
Wiktionary
- n. 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.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A hetman, or chief of the Cossacks.
Etymologies
- From Russian атаман. (Wiktionary)
- Russian, from South Turkic, leader of an armed band : ata, father + -man, augmentative suff. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“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.”
“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.”
“[ "It does not please us!"] for our three officials: the ataman, the scribe, and the treasurer.”
“If the ataman should hear of it, we might get into a scrape, and they also.”
“Do you know what I should have done if we had been taken before the ataman?”
““Shall we take them to the ataman, or straight to the custom house officers?””
“The ataman might detain them; then, when would they get to Tiflis?”
““Did we not intend to take them either to the ataman or to the custom house?” asked Michael, in a disappointed tone.”
““They are very dangerous men, and this man here is their leader ... the ataman of the robbers.””
““How now, ataman?” asked Petunikoff maliciously, excited and pleased at the sight of his enemy in bonds.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘ataman’.
-
POL - people in power
daredevil, tzar, king, boss, master, commander, chief, kingpin, top banana, bigwig, big cheese, big wheel and 452 more...
-
Take Me To Your Whosit
About leaders, particularly the authority-figure at the top of the tree.
leader, chief, boss, cap'n, executive, president, head, tsar, alpha male, alpha female, conductor, dean and 127 more...
-
Monovocalics
Words that have only one of the vowels. On this list I include only words with at least three vowels. When I first started the list, if a word had several forms, I generally listed only the one wit...
syzygy, mirific, cumulus, homolog, monocot, bedewed, jezebel, referee, bikini, minikin, locomotor, terebenthene and 2359 more...
-
looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1408 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for ataman.
knitandpurl "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 Feb 10, 2011