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.

libra.

(a loanword from Spanish)

Headword: 
libra.
Principal English Translation: 

pound, a measure; also Libra, a sign of the zodiac; actually, originally a loanword from Latin, although possibly similar in siixteenth-century Spanish; see Lori Boornazian Diel, The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late-Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 173.

Attestations from sources in English: 

de libra. ca ypan quicuepa balança = Libra: they translate it as the scales. (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, 128–130. noermano roque de luna quitemaCatias censexihuil Se libra Cera ypan teocali = my brother Roque de Luna is to go along providing a pound of wax candles every year for the temple. (Santa María Nativitas, Toluca Valley, 1737) Caterina Pizzigoni, ed., Testaments of Toluca (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2007), 235. nahui libra candela = four pounds of candles (San Pablo Tepemaxalco, Toluca Valley, 1691) Caterina Pizzigoni, ed., Testaments of Toluca (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2007), 129.

themes: 
Measurements, Quantities
Time, Calendar, Frequency