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.

tonameyotl.

Headword: 
tonameyotl.
Principal English Translation: 

sunbeam, ray (see Molina)

IPAspelling: 
toːnɑmejoːtɬ
Alonso de Molina: 

tonameyotl. rayo de sol, o resplandor de rayo de sol.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 149v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

tonameyotl (noun) = ray of the sun, light, brilliancy
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry: Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems (1877), 166.

Sancta Maria, motonameyotitlzinohua, nohuiyan quimomoyahuilia, tepan quimocemmanilia in itonameyotzin = Saint Mary, spread sunbeams. She disperses her sunbeams everywhere, she spreads them all over people (early sixteenth 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), 111.