Although the writing system of Teotihuacan (100 BC–AD 600) continues to resist phonetic decipherment, many important forays have been made in recent decades. With phonetic values still wanting, these texts cannot be verbalized and yet, semantic values can be proposed for discrete combinations of signs. Progress has been made using this exploratory method, yielding semantically coherent sequences, known from important linguistic groups of central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. These sequences constitute metaphorical expressions, and as pairings are characteristic of Mesoamerican lyricism, which are all the more remarkable given the intervening millennium. These poetic expressions pair terms together as metaphorical units, which are often translated across languages in a process known as linguistic calquing. Most linguistic investigations of calques focus on modern attestations in Mesoamerican languages, at times retracing these features to the ethnohistoric literature produced in the wake of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The present study delves much further back, by focusing on the poetic pairings attested in the graphic corpus of Teotihuacan a millennium before. These poetic expressions therefore provide an apt avenue for investigating the language and writing of the great city and reveal that such poetic pairings find their origin in the language of this metropolis. As a contribution to contact and areal linguistics, this paper presents a study of lexical calques attested at Teotihuacan, examining their spatial and temporal distribution, prompting a discussion of language affiliation to evaluate whether these can reveal evidence for linguistic adscription.