octli (FCbk11f122v)
This compound glyph features the beverage called octli. 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 some swirling turquoise blue water with shells and a droplet splashing off (the Nahuatl hieroglyph for atl). Above the water is a European-type bottle that is yellow and has shading, which gives it a three-dimensionality (a European artistic stylistic). This is much like a wine bottle, and the translators of the Florentine Codex called the octli “wine.” So, while neither element–water or wine–provides a phonetic indication for the term octli, together they provide the semantic sense of it.
Stephanie Wood
One traditional visual diagnostic for octli is the foam, usually shown as a group of dots, often bubbling over the top of a cup with a stem, a flat xicalli bowl, or coming out of a jug. For the name Moquihuix, the octli bubbles are worn like shampoo on his head! Another diagnostic is the yacametztli nose ornament. See some examples below.
Stephanie Wood
octli
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
bebidas alcohólicas, vino, agua, botellas
oc(tli), pulque (an alcoholic beverage), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/octli
el pulque
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 122v, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/122v/images/0 Accessed 16 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.”
