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.

potonia.

Headword: 
potonia.
Principal English Translation: 

to place some kind of a poultice with everyday feathers and turpentine (?); or, to cover someone with feathers (see Molina)

IPAspelling: 
potoːniɑ
Alonso de Molina: 

potonia. nitla. vel. nite. (pret. onitepotoni.) poner a otro bizma con pluma menuda sobre la trementina, o emplumar a otro.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 83v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

Auh intla tepal otlama icoac mopotonia = And if he made a captive with the help of others, then his head was pasted with feathers (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 8 -- Kings and Lords, no. 14, Part IX, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1951), 76.

themes: 
Feathers
Health, Sickness, Wellness, Medicine
War, Conflict