Cauac is the nineteenth of the twenty day signs of the Tzolk'in, the 260-day sacred count of the Maya, still kept by highland daykeepers and reconstructed for the Classic period. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Cauac, it corresponds to the day Kawoq in the living K'iche' tradition. Its imagery is the storm and the rain, the thundercloud that renews and purifies, and in the K'iche' Kawoq the community, the family, and the midwife, the gathering of people like the gathering of the rains. It is associated with renewal, the well-being of the whole, and the cleansing storm. In the directional scheme that runs through the twenty signs it belongs to the west and the colour black. These are the meanings the Maya calendrical tradition carries for the day, framed as that living tradition understands them.
Cauac is the nineteenth of the twenty Tzolk'in day signs; the living K'iche' tradition knows the corresponding day as Kawoq, meaning storm or rain, matching the Yucatec sign's own association with storms and renewal. In the directional scheme, Cauac belongs to the west and the colour black. The Cauac glyph in Classic-period inscriptions is distinctive, incorporating a stippled or textured pattern epigraphers generally read as evoking stone or a storm cloud, and it appears prominently in Long Count date notation as the sign marking the Tun, the 360-day period, in the calendar's Initial Series introductory glyphs. Contemporary K'iche' daykeepers associate Kawoq with family, community and collective gathering, reading the storm's power as a metaphor for the force generated when people come together.