The word Kalashnikov can mean:-

• The AK-47 rifle.
• Mikhail Kalashnikov who designed the AK47.

There are other unrelated Russians with surnames Kalashnikov or Kalachnikov. The name literally means "belonging to (= son of) the kalach-man", where kalach is the Russian word for "white bread", which in former times was classed as a type of fancy bread. In Russian the sequence chn rends to be pronounced as shn.