a container for seed, a unit of dry measure of the pre-contact era (i.e. before European colonization), larger than the Spanish fanega, and the amount of produce it will provide
to pass small twigs through the tongue or the ears, to draw blood as a sacrifice to the deities (see Molina)
a penitential ritual that involved drawing sticks (tlacohtli) through the tongue [causing bloodletting] Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 54.
the passing of twigs through the tongue and ears; perforation; self-sacrifice (a pre-Columbian ceremony) Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 72, 73, 198.
third oldest brother; 'teach' suggests older brother, and tlaco means middle, which led Anderson and Dibble to suggest third oldest Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, 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), 108.
a stick, a staff, a rod, a stalk, a switch (see Karttunen and Molina); osier twigs or maguey spines (see Sahagún attestations); relates to blood-letting self-sacrifice