⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-06

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.

ohuatl.

Headword: 
ohuatl.
Principal English Translation: 

green maize stalk (see Molina), sugar cane (see Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants: 
ouatl
IPAspelling: 
owɑtɬ
Alonso de Molina: 

ouatl. caña de mayz verde.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 78r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

OHUA-TL green maize stalks, sugar cane / caña de maíz verde (M), caña de azúcar (Z).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 177.

Attestations from sources in English: 

See an image that represents ohuatl in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

franco ovan = Francisco Ohuan (the glyph near the gloss for the name shows a stalk of maize with three leaves and a flowering top) (Tepetlaoztoc, sixteenth century)
Barbara J. Williams and H. R. Harvey, The Códice de Santa María Asunción: Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 112–113.

themes: