Kolkhozes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of collective farm in the former Soviet Union where members shared in the management and profits as a communal entity
2. Large agricultural cooperatives in the Soviet Union characterized by collective ownership and labor aimed at collective farming practices
3. Farming collectives established in the USSR that enabled peasant farmers to pool their resources and share agricultural output and responsibilities

Etymology: "Kolkhozes" is the plural of "kolkhoz", a Soviet collective farm, where land and equipment were pooled and worked together under state direction. The Russian word is a contraction of "kollektivnoje khozyaystvo", which means "collective farm" or "collective household". Two words were squeezed into one, with the first syllables of each fused into a single compact term. The contraction is what makes the word feel so modern. Soviet officials and the public needed a short, usable label for a new kind of agricultural unit, and blending the phrase into one word made it easy to repeat in newspapers, slogans and official documents. The plural follows the regular English pattern of adding "-es" to a word ending in "z", so it is simply the familiar term used in the plural.