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.

meya.

Headword: 
meya.
Principal English Translation: 

to spread, flow, run (as in water, in a stream, well, or fountain) (see Molina); to exude, gush, bubble up (see Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants: 
meia
IPAspelling: 
meːyɑ
Alonso de Molina: 

meya. (pret. omex.) manar la fuente, o cosa semejante.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 55r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

MĒY(A) pret: MĒX to gush, bubble up/ manar la fuente o cosa semejante (M)
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 145.

Attestations from sources in English: 

meya (verb) = to flow, to trickle
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry: Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems (1877), 157.

Tehuatzin chalchiuhmatlalaacaxtzintle in motetzinco hualmeyaz, hualpipicaz, yn ilhuicac yolilizchalchiuhmatlalatzintli = you of vessel of jade-green water of life (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.

meia = it exudes (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 132.