Troika
noun ·2 syllables ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A Russian carriage drawn by a team of three horses abreast.
"A great writer of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims 'Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who invented thee!' and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping troika to pass."
- 2 a Russian carriage pulled by three horses abreast wordnet
- 3 A party or group of three, especially a ruling council of three people in Soviet or Russian contexts.
"The investigator suspected the poor dead bastards were just a vodka troika that had cheerily frozen to death."
- 4 a modern Russian triumvirate wordnet
- 5 the cardinal number that is the sum of one and one and one wordnet
Example
More examples"The SADC troika referred the matter to a full summit of the 14-nation regional grouping, to take place within the next fortnight at a location as yet not specified."
Etymology
From Russian тро́йка (trójka, “a group of three”).
More for "troika"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.