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.

teicnelilli.

Headword: 
teicnelilli.
Principal English Translation: 

a good deed done to another person; or, compassion, mercy, aid (see Molina and Karttunen)

IPAspelling: 
teːikneːliːlli
Alonso de Molina: 

teicnelilli. beneficio hecho a otro.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 94r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TĒICNĒLĪL-LI compassion, mercy, aid / beneficio hecho a otro (M) [(2)Bf.5v,13r]. By general rule the vowel of the fourth syllable should be long, but it is unmarked for length in both attestations. See (I)CNĒLIĀ.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 220.

Attestations from sources in English: 

in jxqujch teicnelilli = all the gifts (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, 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, 1961), 129.

themes: 
Gifts, Offerings, Sacrificial Rites
Religion (Indigenous)