molotl. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

molotl.

Principal English Translation:

a common house finch (see Molina); or, a sparrow (see attestation in Spanish); or, a white-winged tanager (Florentine Codex); also, a person's name (attested as male)

Orthographic Variants:

Mollotl

Alonso de Molina:

molotl. pardal, o gorrion.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 58v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English:

See an image that represents molotl in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

MOLO-TL, House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) [FC: 48 Molotl]: “It is chalky, ashen, dark ashen; short-billed; medium sized, small; agile, a hopper; a singer. It is a warbler, a talker. It is capable of domestication; it is teachable; it can be bred.… The completely ashen one is the hen, and the chili-red-headed one is the cock…. It sings constantly. It hops about, it hops almost constantly. It is agile; it moves with agility.” Certainly, the House Finch. The male may be distinguished as CUACHICHIL/NŌCH-TŌTŌ-TL.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, 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, 1963); and, and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.

The Florentine Codex has a painting of this bird. The keywording team of the DFC calls it a white-winged tanager, but the translation by Anderson and Dibble calls it a common house finch.
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 51v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/51v/images/7f6b5d46-3... Accessed 18 October 2025.

yn iyoquich ytoca mollotl = Her husband is named Molotl. (Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 146–147.

Molotl is also attested in the Codex Mendoza as the central feature of a simplex hieroglyph of a place name.
Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-.) https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/content/molotla-mdz23r.

Attestations from sources in Spanish:

nicteanilitoh molotl yc moxtlauaz = por un gorrión que le tomé, para que se pague (Tulancingo, México, 1577)
Vidas y bienes olvidados: Testamentos indígenas novohispanos, vol. 2, Testamentos en náhuatl y castellano del siglo XVI, eds., Teresa Rojas Rabiela, Elsa Leticia Rea López, Constantino Medina Lima (Mexico: Consejo Nacional de Ciencias Tecnología, 1999), 196–197.

themes:

Animals, Bugs, Insects, Reptiles, Fish, etc.

Feathers