Cossack
See also: cossack
English
Cossacks (military).
Etymology
Circa 1600, from Middle French cosaque, from Polish Kozak[1], from Ukrainian коза́к (kozák) (cf. Russian каза́к (kazák) or Russian коза́к (kozák) (older spelling)), from Kazakh қазақ (qazaq), from Old Turkic *qazaq (*qazaq, “free man, independent”), from qazmaq (qazmaq, “to dig, scrape, scratch”), from Proto-Turkic *kaŕ-.[2] Doublet of Kazakh.
Pronunciation
- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈkɒsˌæk/
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈkɑsˌæk/, /ˈkɔsˌæk/
- Hyphenation: Cos‧sack
Noun
Cossack (plural Cossacks)
- A member or descendant of an originally (semi-)nomadic population of Eastern Europe and the adjacent parts of Asia, formed in part of runaways from neighbouring countries, that eventually settled in parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian tsarist Empire (where they constituted a legendary military caste), particularly in areas now comprising southern Russia and Ukraine.
- A member of a military unit (typically cavalry, originally recruited exclusively from the above).
- (obsolete) A Ukrainian.
Derived terms
- Cossackdom
- Cossack green
- Cossack hat
- Cossack post
- decossackization
Related terms
Translations
member of a population
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member of a Cossack military unit
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
References
- Etymology and history of “cosaque”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
- “Cossack”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
Anagrams
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