Principal English Translation:
a bolt of lightning; a lightning flash
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 156.
Orthographic Variants:
tlapetlānīllōtl, tlapetlanilutl, tlapetlanjllotl, tlapetlanilotl
Attestations from sources in English:
Tlapetlanjllotl, tlapetlanjliztli: much ic quinotzaia, quitocaiotiaia, aiauhcocolli, tlapetlanjlquauitl, oztopilcoauitl. = Lighting; the Lighting Flash. They addressed it as, and named it, many things -- the mist which went winding [like a serpent], the thunderbolt, the reed staff. (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 7 -- The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Venus, No. 14, Part VIII, 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), 15.