ocelotl (FCbk11f1v)
This iconographic example, featuring a jaguar (ocelotl), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows a profile view of a healthy, standing jaguar, facing toward the viewer's right. The animal’s lips are open enough to reveal teeth, and the claws on its paws are clearly evident, too.
Stephanie Wood
Note on folio 2 recto of Book 11 there are two more ocelotl, one is red and one is white. The Nahuatl term for jaguar (ocelotl) can fool people into reading “ocelot” in English, but the ocelot is a smaller animal. A synonym for ocelotl is tecuani. And, after the Spanish invasion and colonization, jaguars were sometimes called “tigres” or “leones,” animals that were not previously known in the Americas. Ocelotl can appear in place names, and Ocelotl was a day name in the tonalpohualli religious divinatory calendar. As a result, many people could carry that personal name, but all eight examples in this digital collection (as of October 2025) are men’s names. This may be owing to the existence of a famed jaguar warrior unit that was male.
Stephanie Wood
Ocelutl
ocelotl
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
jaguares, jaguars, animales feroces, ferocious
ocelo(tl), jaguar, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ocelotl
el jaguar
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 1v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/1v/images/0 Accessed 7 October 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
