Principal English Translation:
to owe something to someone
Frances Karttunen:
HUĪQUILIĀ vt to take, carry something for someone; to owe something to someone / lo lleve a él, lo debe a él (T) The sense of ‘to owe’ this verb has in modern Nahuatl appears already in C on f. 101r and is common in colonial-period texts. applic. HUĪCA. HUĪQUILILIĀ applic. HUĪQUILIĀ. HUĪQUILĪLŌ nonact. HUĪQUILIĀ.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 90.
Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written:
nic. to be responsible to someone for something; to owe money to someone. with huāl-, to bring something to someone. Class 3: onichuīquilih. applicative of huīca. 218
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), 218.
Attestations from sources in English:
Literally, to carry for. From huica.
After the beginning of the 18th century, this became the dominant word used to convey owe, replacing pialia. Even by the mid-seventeenth century, Carochi already considered huiquilia to mean owe. James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 183–4.
nichuiquilia ce quixtiano ytoca medina media fanega trigo = I owe to a Spaniard named Medina a half fanega of wheat (Saltillo, 1682)
Leslie S. Offutt, "Levels of Acculturation in Northeastern New Spain; San Esteban Testaments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Estudios de cultura náhuatl 22 (1992), 409–443, see page 434–435.