⚠ 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.

tlacomolli.

Headword: 
tlacomolli.
Principal English Translation: 

large pit, ravine, hole in the earth (see Molina and Karttunen), might also have referred to a type of soil (see attestations)

IPAspelling: 
tɬɑkomoːlli
Alonso de Molina: 

tlacomolli. hoyo grande o barranco.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 118v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TLACOMŌL-LI large pit, ravine, hole in the earth / hoyo grande o barranco (M) [(3)Zp.95,99,204]. The vowel of the last syllable is marked long in only one of three attestations. M has comoloa ‘to make holes, ravines’. See COMŌL-LI…
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 256.

Attestations from sources in English: 

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

tlacomule = level land soils in Alta, Puebla (twentieth century)
Barbara J. Williams and Carlos Ortiz-Solorio, "Middle American Folk Soil Taxonomy," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 71:3 (September 1981), 335–358. See p. 346.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

huel onpa tlantica yn canpa ca huey tlacomonli = llega hasta el hoyo grande (Tlatelolco, 1609)
Vidas y bienes olvidados: Testamentos en náhuatl y castellano del siglo XVII, vol. 3, Teresa Rojas Rabiela, et al, eds. (México: CIESAS, 2002), 72–73.

See also: