Colima

Borrowed from Spanish Colima, of Nahuatl origin.

Colima

1. A city and state of Mexico.

Borrowed from Classical Nahuatl Collimān (the name of a historic kingdom roughly situated in modern-day Colima), of uncertain exact morphology; however, the most probable proposed etymology is the following:

• Based on the hieroglyph for Collimān in the Codex Mendoza, depicting a bent arm with 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 which has also been observed in some other Nahuatl toponyms.^[1] In toponyms, acolli is used metaphorically to describe the bending of a nearby river; thus, the toponym *Ācollimān would roughly mean "place where the water twists" or "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.^[2][3]

• IPA^(key): /koˈlima/ [koˈli.ma]
• Rhymes: -ima
• Syllabification: Co‧li‧ma

Colima f

1. a city and state of Mexico.

Colima

1. a city and state of Mexico.