Spanish Loanwords | M

Letter M: Displaying 1 - 20 of 110

a very large knife, almost sword-like (attested as a loanword from Spanish in a Nahuatl document from 1549)
Frances E. Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 56.

mɑtʃo

a male animal, such as a mule (noun); or, masculine (adjective)
(a loanword from Spanish)

mother
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
mayestro

master or teacher, a person with a Master's degree
(a loanword from Spanish)

Caterina Pizzigoni, ed., Testaments of Toluca (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2007), 248.

Orthographic Variants: 
Matarena. Magdalenan, Madalena

a saint's name, given to indigenous women upon baptism, beginning in the 16th c.; interesting, too, for the orthographic variations in writing it in Nahuatl; also a patron saint (María Magdalena) from some communities (see attestations)

majesty
(a loanword from Spanish)

magnificent
(a loanword from Spanish)

an agave plant
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
maytines

matins; morning prayers in the Catholic church; office (with lauds) constituting the first of the canonical hours, before daybreak
(a loanword from Spanish)

(central Mexico, late sixteenth century; originally from Sahagún in 1574, a document that Chimalpahin copied)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 180–181 and see note 26.

Orthographic Variants: 
magestad, majesdad

majesty
(a loanword from Spanish)

a Spanish surname; the name of an important Spanish Fiscal in sixteenth-century New Spain
(a loanword from Spanish)

a youth
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
madamietons

an official order, a ruling
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
maca

sleeve(s)
(a loanword from Spanish)

a sacred garment, like a stole but shorter
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
manoxo

a bundle of grass, twigs, etc.
(a loanword from Spanish)

cloth, blanket, cape

Orthographic Variants: 
matega

lard
(a loanword from Spanish)

tablecloth, or other large rectangular cloth(?)
(a loanword from Spanish)