⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-06

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.

tlanextli.

Headword: 
tlanextli.
Principal English Translation: 

light, radiance
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), 237.

Orthographic Variants: 
tlanēxtli
IPAspelling: 
tɬɑneːʃtɬi
Alonso de Molina: 

tlanextli. luz, claridad o resplandor.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 128v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TLANĒX-TLI light, radiance / luz, claridad, o resplandor (M) See TLANĒC(I).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 285.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

patientive noun from some verb form related to nēci. 237

Attestations from sources in English: 

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

in yancuic tonatiuh in yancuic tlanextli = the new sun, the new light (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 152–153.

yn tlaçotlanextzintli in mochpochxillantzinco = the precious light that is in your maidenly womb (early seventeenth century, Central Mexico)
Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 55.

tlanēxtli = window opening
Berenice Alcántara and Pedro A. Muñoz, "'You Here, Don't Do It This Way': Allegory and Domestic Dwellings in Bernardino de Sahagún's Nahuatl Sermons of the House," Ethnohistory 71:2 (April 2024), see p. 149.