⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-17 - Repairs are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

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.

cuitlaxcolli.

Headword: 
cuitlaxcolli.
Principal English Translation: 

entrails, intestines

IPAspelling: 
kwitɬɑʃkolli
Alonso de Molina: 

cuitlaxcolli. tripas.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 27v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

CUITLAXCOL-LI intestines / tripas (M) [(1)Tp.129,(1)Zp.157]. The second element seems related to CŌLOĀ ‘to curve, twist’ in spite of the vowel-length discrepancy. See CUITL(A)-TL.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 74.

Attestations from sources in English: 

in tenitl yn cuextecatl yc pehuaz in yaoyotl onca[n] momanaz y[n] Matlalxochipa[n] cuitlaxcol atlauhtli yez etc. (Anales de Juan Bautista, f. 8v–9r, 1582) = The foreigner [tenitl], those from the Huaxteca will set out to make war, making their basecamp in Matlalxochipan. There they will fill a canyon with human innards.
Ezekiel G. Stear, Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025), 129.

ca much vncā [fol.31] icuiliuhtoc in tzontecomatl, nacaztli, iollotli, cuitlaxculli eltapachtli, tochichi, macpalli, xocpalli = for there were painted all severed heads, ears, hearts, entrails, livers, lungs, hands and feet (Mexico City, sixteenth century)
James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Repertorium Columbianum v. 1 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993), 128.

Aca icuitlaxcoltzin quitlatlamachica. Itechpa mitoa: in tlachichiuhqui, in iuhqui amantecatl, in uel quiyecchichioa in itlachioal. = Someone who arranges his intestines artistically. This is said of an artesan, such as a feather-artist, who does his work beautifully and designs it well.
Thelma D. Sullivan, "Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums, and Metaphors, Collected by Sahagún," Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 4 (1963), 126–127.

Bird intestines (totocuitlaxcolli) are illustrated in the Digital Florentine Codex, Book 11, 60r.
Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 60r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/60r/images/0 Accessed 25 October 2025.

themes: 
Anatomy