Nezahualcóyotl

History & meaning

The name splits cleanly: nezahualiztli, the act of fasting, and cōyotl, coyote. English speakers already own the second half without knowing it — coyote came into English from Spanish, which took it from Nahuatl, along with chocolate, tomato, avocado and chilli. Say the whole thing in five beats with the weight on the fourth, neh-sah-wahl-KOH-yotl, and let the last syllable land light: that -tl is one consonant, not a t followed by an l. While you are here, the Nahuatl x is an English "sh," so his city, spelled Texcoco in Spanish, began as tesh-KOH-koh. None of this is archaeology. Nahuatl has more than 1.6 million living speakers, and the rules that govern this name govern their speech today.

He was born in 1402 and watched the Tepanecs kill his father, spent years in exile, and came back in 1431 with Itzcóatl's Mexica behind him to take Texcoco. Then he built. The dike he threw across Lake Texcoco, some sixteen kilometres of it, kept brackish water off the freshwater side and out of Tenochtitlan; the terraced gardens and aqueduct at Texcotzingo were an engineering showpiece. And roughly thirty poems come down to us attributed to him in the Cantares Mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, collected in the sixteenth century. Scholars treat the individual attributions as traditional rather than proven, but the poems themselves are real, they are taught in Mexican schools, and they circle one subject: flowers, song, and how briefly anything holds.

Is it a name given today?

No, and its absence from birth registries is odd only until you say it out loud. Five syllables and a final -tl make a heavy load for a first name even in Mexico. What the name does instead is sit everywhere in Mexican public life: Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in the State of Mexico holds over a million people and is universally shortened to Neza, and generations of Mexicans handled his face on the hundred-peso note without thinking about it. The Nahuatl names actually given to boys are shorter ones — Cuauhtémoc, Tenoch, Tonatiuh.

Using Nezahualcóyotl as a middle name

The middle slot is where a name this long can live: Diego Nezahualcóyotl, Emiliano Nezahualcóyotl, Mateo Nezahualcóyotl, Juan Nezahualcóyotl. A one or two-syllable first name is not optional here, it is structural — anything longer and the full name stops being sayable. Our middle names guide works through the balance.

The name in Mexico

Besides the city and the banknote, he holds a strange double position: a pre-conquest ruler admired by the Spanish chroniclers who wrote about him, partly because his poems dwell on a single unnamed giver of life and were easy to read as proto-monotheism. Mexican readers have generally been less interested in that reading and more interested in the plain fact of the verse — a head of state, five hundred years ago, whose lines about the shortness of life are still quoted at funerals.

Consider instead

Tenoch and Tonatiuh give you Nahuatl at a length a child can carry. Emiliano offers the Mexican hero register in a name that is already at home in English.