⚠ 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.

temamauhti.

Headword: 
temamauhti.
Principal English Translation: 

something that frightens people, terrifying things; frightful

James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 233.

Alonso de Molina: 

temamauhti. cosa espantosa y temerosa, o cosa fea.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 97r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

pret. agentive of mahmauhtia. 233

Attestations from sources in English: 

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

in manel ye huel temahmauti, yn ahmo tenehualoni = even though really frightening and unmentionable
Andrés Sáenz de la Peña, Manual de los Santo Sacramentos, 1643, f. 34r.; translation by Mark Z. Christensen, "Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Ecclesiastical Texts and Local Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan," Ph.D. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2010, Appendix E, 12.

in cenca temamauhti = these very terrifying things (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Repertorium Columbianum v. 1 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993), 76.

huel senca temamauhti yhuan tetequipacho yn oquimochihuilico = What they came to do took people greatly aback and troubled them. Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, ed. and transl. Camilla Townsend, with an essay by James Lockhart (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 128–129.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

huel temamauh mochiuh = fue de espanto (Tlaxcala, 1662–1692)
Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, Historia cronológica de la Noble Ciudad de Tlaxcala, transcripción paleográfica, traducción, presentación y notas por Luis Reyes García y Andrea Martínez Baracs (Tlaxcala and México: Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, Secretaría de Extensión Universitaria y Difusión Cultural, y Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1995), 524–525.