Noun

Singular adobe

Plural usually uncountable; plural adobes

adobe (usually uncountable; plural adobes)

1. An unburnt brick dried in the sun

   Many people in Texas and New Mexico live in adobe houses.

2. A house made of adobe brick
   • 2007 March 11, Ralph Blumenthal, “Prosecutor’s Ouster Shifts Political Order”, New York Times:

     The snow-dusted mesas and million-dollar adobes look enchanting as ever […] .

Quotations

• Stone sidewalks, little more than a ledge in width, ran along the base of the mean and monotonous adobe houses. — O’Henry, Cabbages and Kings
• “Find me a nice, clean adobe wall,” says he, “and send Senor Rompiro up against it.” — O’Henry, Roads of Destiny
• The Jawas mutter gibberish as they busily line up their battered captives, including Artoo and Threepio, in front of the enormous Sandcrawler, which is parked beside a small homestead consisting of three large holes in the ground surrounded by several tall moisture vaporators and one small adobe block house. — Star Wars script
• 2003: The Sangre de Cristos came into view and the first soft-cornered adobe houses, and that night we ate at La Fonda with my Aunt Elsie, who worked for the Indian Bureau, and had Hopi snake dances and San Ildefonso pottery-makers and Mabel Dodge Luhan in store for us in the coming weeks. — Roger Angell, in The New Yorker, 26 May 2003

Anagrams

• abode

Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, and water, with some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, dung), which is shaped into bricks using frames and dried in the sun. It is similar to cob and mudbrick. Adobe structures are extremely durable and account for some of the oldest extant buildings on the planet. In hot climates, compared to wooden buildings, adobe buildings offer significant advantages due to their greater thermal mass, but they are known to be particularly susceptible to seismic damage in an event such as an earthquake.

Buildings made of sun-dried earth are common in the Middle East, North Africa, South America, southwestern North America, and in Spain (usually in the Mudéjar style). Adobe had been in use by indigenous peoples of the Americas in the Southwestern United States, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region of South America for several thousand years, although often substantial amounts of stone are used in the walls of Pueblo buildings. (Also, the Pueblo people built their adobe structures with handfuls or basketfuls of adobe, until the Spanish introduced them to the making of bricks.) Adobe brickmaking was used in Spain already in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the eighth century B.C. on. Its wide use can be attributed to its simplicity of design and make, and the cheapness thereby in creating it.

A distinction is sometimes made between the smaller adobes, which are about the size of ordinary baked bricks, and the larger adobines, some of which may be one to two yards (2 m) long.