⚠ 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.

machete.

(a loanword from Spanish)

Headword: 
machete.
Principal English Translation: 

a very large knife, almost sword-like (attested as a loanword from Spanish in a Nahuatl document from 1549)
Frances E. Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 56.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

ma:chet = machete
Ne ma:chet ne:mi tic ne ma:jsal. = El machete esta: en la rama. (Sonsonate, El Salvador, Nahuat or Pipil, s. XX)
Tirso Canales, Nahuat (San Salvador: Universidad de El Salvador, Editorial Universitaria, 1996), 11–12.