tlaximalli = wood chips and shavings (many of the shavings the image are swirling); tlaximalli is also called cuauhtlaximalli and tlaxhimallotl (SW)
Sahagún, Bernardino de, Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, Mateo Severino, et al. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Florentine Codex), Ms. Mediceo Palatino 218–20, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, MiBACT, 1577. Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter, Alicia Maria Houtrouw, Kevin Terraciano, Jeanette Peterson, Diana Magaloni, and Lisa Sousa, bk. 11, fol. 120r. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/120r?spTexts=&nhTexts= . Accessed 12 November 2025.
See an image that represents tlaximalli in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).
tlaxīmalli = "wood beams evened with a plane"
Berenice Alcántara and Pedro A. Muñoz, "'You Here, Don't Do It This Way': Allegory and Domestic Dwellings in Bernardino de Sahagún's Nahuatl Sermons of the House," Ethnohistory 71:2 (April 2024), see p. 151.