tlamaca. | Nahuatl Dictionary

⚠ 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.

tlamaca.

Headword:

tlamaca.

Principal English Translation:

to serve at the table, provide food, or to administer meals (see Molina and Karttunen); or to help dress someone; possibly intends Tlamanca (someone from Tlamanca, Puebla); also, a person's name

IPAspelling:

tɬɑmɑkɑ

Alonso de Molina:

tlamaca. nite. (pret. onitetlamacac.) seruir ala mesa, o administrar la comida y manjares.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 125r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

TLAMACA vt to serve someone food / servir a la mesa o administrar la comida y manjares (M) [(3)Tp.208, (3)Zp.8,30,195]. This contrasts in transitivity with TLAMACA ‘to give blows.’ See MACA.

TLAMACALŌ nonact. TLAMACA.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 278.

Attestations from sources in English:

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

ytoca tlamaca = named Tlamaca (attested male; husband of Tlacoton) (Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 146–147. See also 156–157.

Three men of this name also appear in what is now Hidalgo.
Congregaciones civiles de Tulancingo, eds. Jesús Ruvalcaba and ‎Ariane Baroni (1994, 83).