Search Issues: Update 2026-09-16 - Repairs to some of our search pages are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

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

neixcuitilli.

Headword: 
neixcuitilli.
Principal English Translation: 

an example; something that sets an example; a dramatic performance (entered Spanish as nixcuitiles)

Louise M. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 46.

Orthographic Variants: 
nixcuitile
IPAspelling: 
neiːʃkwiːtiːlli
Alonso de Molina: 

neixcuitilli. dechado, o exemplo.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 66r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

NEĪXCUĪTĪL-LI example, model, pattern / dechado o ejemplo (M), señal, demostración, prueba, maravilla, milagro (Z) [(6)Zp.41,82,84,103,115,178]. In Z the sequence NEĪX has been consolidated to NĒX. See ĪXCUĪTIĀ.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 163.

Attestations from sources in English: 

Neixcuitilli was a term for "a new performance genre, but one possessing continuities with earlier Nahua forms and not quite the equivalent of 'drama' in the European sense." It was a didactic type of theater, and Spaniards described it as a "theater of evangelization." But, "it may have seemed to the observers as though Christian personae had entered their presence and taken on Nahua identities."
Louise M. Burkhart, Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 46, 47.

anquitquitinemi tlanextli, antetlahuilia, ynic amotech neyxchuitiloz = you go about bearing light, you illuminate people, so that people will take you as examples (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), 67.

neixcuitlilli = example (early sixteenth 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), 131.

themes: 
Theater, Drama