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.

tenchalli.

Headword: 
tenchalli.
Principal English Translation: 

chin, beard (see Molina and Karttunen)

IPAspelling: 
teːntʃɑlli
Alonso de Molina: 

tenchalli. barua, no los pelos.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 98v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TĒNCHAL-LI chin, beard / barba, no los pelos (M), su barba (T for possessed form) [(7)Tp.134,158]. The CHAL element also occurs in CAMACHAL-LI 'jaw.' Although M specifically excludes individual hairs, in T TĒNCHAL is compounded with verbs of plucking and cutting. See TĒN-TLI.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 224.

Attestations from sources in English: 

totenchal = our chin (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan, et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 256.

tenchalli = chin (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.

themes: