⚠ 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.

canahuac.

Headword: 
canahuac.
Principal English Translation: 

something thin, such as a delicate fabric (see Molina)

Orthographic Variants: 
canauac, canaoac
Alonso de Molina: 

canauac. cosa delgada desta manera, lienzo, o manta delgada de algodon.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 12r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

canāhuac = thin
Michel Launey, An Introduction to Classical Nahuatl, translated and adapted by Christopher MacKay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 110.

canaoac = thin (speaking of hair on cheeks) (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), 111.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

canahuac = "lienzos delgados...hechos por mujeres ricas" (citando el Códice Florentino, 1979, lib. II: 75) (p. 101)
Katarzyna Mikulska, "Te hago bandera... Signos de banderas y sus significados en la expresión gráfica nahua", en Los códices mesoamericanos: registros de religión, política y sociedad, Miguel Ángel Ruz Barrio y Juan José Batalla Rosado, coordinadores (Zinacantepec: El Colegio Mexiquense, 2016), 85–133.