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.

temazatl.

Headword: 
temazatl.
Principal English Translation: 

a brocket or roe deer; a type of small deer with unusual antlers (see Molina, where perhaps corzo is meant for "roe deer"; and see the attestations)

IPAspelling: 
temɑːsɑtɬ
Alonso de Molina: 

temazatl. cuerzo.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 96v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

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

"a little black-faced brocket (Coassus rufinus), the “temazatl” of the Aztecs, [has] small, unbranched antlers, or brockets , which stands twenty inches high at the withers...."
Hans Gadow, Through Southern Mexico: Being an Account of the Travels of a Naturalist, 1908.

"a small, goat-sized brocket deer called temazatl"
John E. Clark, The Development of Early Formative Rank Societies in the Soconusco, Chiapas, vol. 1, 1994, 79.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

Mazate o temazate le llaman al corzo americano (Mazama americana), pequeño venado de color rojizo, de agudos...."
César Corzo Espinosa, Palabras de origen indígena en el español de Chiapas, 1978, 184.

"La cierva no tiene cuernos, quando es chiquillo, el ciervo, o la cierva, es pintado, de unas pintas blancas, espessos por todo el cuerpo. El temaçatl es cabra montesa." Libro 11, fol. 16, p. 170v.
Pilar Maynez, El calepino de Sahagún: un acercamiento, 237.

temazatl = corzo
Boletín de la Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística, 1910, 507.

themes: 
Animals, Bugs, Insects, Reptiles, Fish, etc.