⚠ 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.

ipal.

Headword: 
ipal.
Principal English Translation: 

by means of which; because of someone's help

Orthographic Variants: 
ypal
IPAspelling: 
iːpɑl
Alonso de Molina: 

Ipal. por el, o mediante el.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, f. 41v.

Frances Karttunen: 

ĪPAL possessed form, prefixed with third person singular possessive Ī- for, by means of something or someone / por él, o mediante él (M) see –PAL
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 107.

Attestations from sources in English: 

yz cate ypal nemi y tlatoani aocac ynaçi aocac ytaçi ymomexti ypal nemi ça tlatlatia ça tlachpana = Here are two people maintained by the tlatoani who no longer have either a mother or a father. They are maintained just by putting things away and sweeping. (Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 132–133.