⚠ 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.

aotli.

Headword: 
aotli.
Principal English Translation: 

water pipe, aqueduct, canal (see Molina and attestations); literally, a water-road

Orthographic Variants: 
aohtli
IPAspelling: 
ɑːohtɬi
Alonso de Molina: 

aotli. caño de agua.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 6v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

aotontli = literally: "at the little water road", see Beyond the Codices 84/116m: 49r
Rebecca Horn's notecards from Nahuatl study sessions with James Lockhart in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

1615. años. yhcuac oquipehualtico. i ye quicuauhtzotzona huey aohtli in xuchimilcopa huitz = the year 1615, was when they began to drive piles in the great canal coming from Xochimilco (central Mexico, 1615)
Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala, eds. and transl. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 300–1.

yquac acico yn aotli Sant Juan = was when the aqueduct reached San Juan (early seventeenth century, central New Spain)
Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and Doris Namala, eds. and transl. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 28–29.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

aotli, canal, acueducto, se compone de atl, agua y otli, camino
Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la lengua náhuatl o mexicana (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1996), xxviii.