⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-06

Some of our more complex, multi-field searches (such as the search field on our homepage and Search All Fields) are currently under repair and may not work as expected.

Thank you to all our users who emailed to alert us to the problem! We hope to have it repaired soon.

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

chiucnahui.

Headword: 
chiucnahui.
Principal English Translation: 

nine (see Lockhart and Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants: 
chicunahui, chiconahui, chiconaui, chicuinauhtetli, chiuhnatzin
IPAspelling: 
tʃiwknɑːwi
Alonso de Molina: 

chiconaui. nueue. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 20r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

CHIUCNĀHU(I ) nine / nueve (M) Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 53.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

nine; combining form chiucnāuh-. Chiucnāuhtlān. an altepetl, "place of nine." James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 214.

Attestations from sources in English: 

chiuhnatzin oran = at 9 o'clock (San Bartolomé Capulhuac, Valley of Toluca, 1625)
Genealogical Library records, Salt Lake; Microfilm 695644, vol. I, 1612–1651, matrimonios)

chicnahui tlapoalpan cahuitl oquizquí Ynic cenmochtin yní macehualhuan = Chiucna:hui tlapo:hualpan ca:huitl o:quizqui pana ini:c cenmochtin in i:ma:cehualhua:n. = In one hundred and eighty days time all his vassals left together. (Tlaxcala, ca. 1600)
Anónimo mexicano, ed. Richley H. Crapo and Bonnie Glass-Coffin (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2005), 12.

ic chicuinauhtli = ninth; see the Nahuatl-language discussion of Libra, the ninth sign of the zodiac, in Lori Boornazian Diel, The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late-Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 173. This spelling is suggestive of an early form (chicui-) that produced the chic-, chiuc-, numerical combining forms that were equal to "five."

themes: 
Numbers, Math
Time, Calendar, Frequency