a tumpline, a leather strap that runs across the forehead and down the back, for carrying loads; the paired phrase, "huictli mecapalli," the hoe, the tumpline, was a reference to the work of commoner males (see attestations)
to crush (patzca) someone with a net (matlatl) or rope (mecatl) Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 132r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/132r/images/36fcfff6-... Accessed 5 October 2025. This was part of a ritual of human sacrifice.
the child of an enslaved human being (central Mexico, sixteenth century) Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 2.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 2 -- The Ceremonies, No. 14, Part III, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1951), 53.
a cord, a rope; also a unit of area, in most places twenty by twenty matl, but in the Culhuacan wills seemingly twenty by two hundred; also seen to intend "lashes" in the case of whippings; also seen as consort, concubine, when possessed (loaned to Spanish as mecate) S. L. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580-1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 236.