Colima.
a city and state of Mexico.
Meaning & usage
a city and state of Mexico.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from Classical Nahuatl Collimān (the name of a historic kingdom roughly situated in modern-day Colima), of uncertain exact further origin; however, the most probable proposed etymology is the following: * Based on the hieroglyph for Collimān in the Codex Mendoza, depicting a bent arm with a stream of water, the linguist Javier Bravo Magaña reconstructs a Classical Nahuatl *Ācollimān, derived from a compound of ātl (“water”) + acolli (literally “shoulder”) + -mān (locative suffix). Magaña identifies the attested form Collimān as a shortened variant derived via apheresis of the initial /a/, a phonetic shift also observed in other Nahuatl toponyms. In toponyms, acolli is used metaphorically to describe the bending of a nearby river; thus, the toponym *Ācollimān would roughly mean "the place where the water twists" or "the place of the river bend". The historian Ernesto Terríquez Sámano supports this theory further by positing that the "bent arm" glyph is actually a hydrographic map of the Armería River at Caxitlán (the capital city of Collimān), where it makes a distinct elbow-like turn.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.