metate
Americannoun
-
metates
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of metate
1825–35, < Mexican Spanish < Nahuatl metlatl
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The woman's mother had buried her molcajete, metate, comal, and cazuelas in a hole in the ground and fled.
From Salon ● Feb. 23, 2023
Each of the seating areas has a bench shaped like a metate and a brand that marks the cattle of that region.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 2, 2021
In a shaded courtyard overgrown with succulents, Margarita, with her graying pigtails and brightly embroidered apron, had crushed rice, which had been soaking for an hour or so, on a metate, a hollowed, mortarlike stone.
From New York Times ● Nov. 11, 2021
An original mano and metate, a pair of stones used for grinding, lay on the dirt floor of one room.
From Slate ● Jun. 12, 2015
The first of the latter shows the use of a discarded metate, or mealing stone, and the second of a gourd that has been walled into the coping.
From A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228 by Henry Hobart Nichols
The metates also display many puzzling pseudo-glyphs on them that have yet to be studied and deciphered.
From National Geographic
Some archaeologists believe the metates may have been used not just as thrones, but also as seats for carrying the bundled and decorated bodies of the dead to their final resting place.
From National Geographic
They make very little pottery, but we found stored in many of the houses of the village great quantities of stone implements, principally large metates and grinding-stones.
On the floor of this room a structure resembling the piki or paper bread oven of the Tusayan Indians, was found constructed partly of fragments of old and broken metates.
From Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 179-262 by Cosmos Mindeleff
Of furniture I secured pieces of new hearth-stones; of other articles, broken "metates," part of a fine maul of stone, flint chips, celts, stone skin-scrapers, and, of course, painted pottery and obsidian.
From Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos Papers Of The Archæological Institute Of America, American Series, Vol. I by Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
