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cocotli.

Headword: 
cocotli.
Principal English Translation: 

dove, turtledove; Inca or Mexican dove (Digital Florentine Codex); also, perhaps this means "little one" (a diminutive); an onomatopoetic word; see also our entry for cocotli meaning tube, throat, windpipe, or urethra

Orthographic Variants: 
cocohtli
IPAspelling: 
koːkohtɬi
Alonso de Molina: 

cocotli. tortola.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 23v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Horacio Carochi / English: 

cocotzin = diminutive, possibly "little one" -- This could be little dove or little girl, it is not clear. See Lockhart's discussion in footnote 2 on page 458.
Horacio Carochi, S.J., Grammar of the Mexican language with an explanation of its adverbs (1645), translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart, UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 458 n2; 500.

Attestations from sources in English: 

CŌCOH-TLI/CŌCOH-TZIN, Inca Dove (Columbina inca): [FC: 48 Cocotli] “It is small and squat, near the ground…. The legs are chili-red, short. And it is from its song that it is called cocotli; its song says, coco, coco.” This could only be the Inca Dove (Columbina inca).
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, 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, 1963); and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.

cocohtli = Inca dove; used in a translation of the Latin turtur, for turtle-dove
Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 52, note 45.

vnteme cocoti in inuentzin omuchiuh = their offering became two doves (early seventeenth century, Central Mexico)
Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 69.

icnococotzin = poor little dove (16th c., central Mexico)
Thelma D. Sullivan, "Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums, and Metaphors, Collected by Sahagún," Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 4 (1963), 114–115.

Icnococotzin = Humble like a turtledove (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
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), 228.

See a painting of this bird on line in the Digital Florentine Codex:
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 52r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/52r/images/9d1691cf-a... Accessed 18 October 2025.

See the Nahuatl hieroglyph for the personal name Cocotli in the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, f. 563 recto, hosted free on line in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-), https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/content/cocotli-mh563r.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

Icnococotzin = Humjlde como vna tortolica que nj tiene nj deue (centro de México, s. XVI)
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), 228.

themes: 
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Colors
Feathers
Metaphors, Proverbs, Riddles
Sensory Perception (sound, smell, etc.)