Khokhol is a term used to describe the typical Ukrainian cossack style of haircut that features a lock of hair sprouting from the top or the front of an otherwise closely shaven head. It is commonly used as a pejorative term for ethnic Ukrainians.

Colloquialism

Russians and Poles commonly use the word khokhol (hahol) as an ethnic slur for Ukrainians, as it was a common haircut of Cossacks. The term is frequently derogatory or condescending, an equivalent of the Ukrainian term katsap and Polish kacap for Russians.

Ukrainian culture

The Ukrainian

Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

 name for this type of haircut is oseledets

Oseledets

Chupryna or Oseledets is the traditional Ukrainian Cossack haircut. It describes a style of man's haircut that features a lock of hair sprouting from the top or the front of an otherwise closely shaven head. This military haicut was of Circassian or Turkish origin...

or chub (чуб, "crest"). There are several Ukrainian

Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...

 surnames derived from this word. In the Cossacks times the haircut carried an honorary meaning identifying one as being the true Cossack

Cossack

Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...

. That tradition is depicted in various motion pictures such as Propala Hramota

Propala Hramota

Propala hramota is a 1972 Soviet musical-comedy film by Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev. It is one of many films which were eventually banned by the Soviet censorship. It was broadcasted only in the early 1990th, after the fall of the Union. The movie is considered a pearl of the national Ukrainian...

 that is based on works of Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

.

The khokhol/oseledets is a standard feature in the stereotype

Stereotype

A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings...

image of a Ukrainian Cossack.