Adobe

How to spell adobe

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce adobe

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does adobe mean?

1. nounA building brick or material made from clay and straw dried in the sun, or a structure built from it.

Adobe in a sentence

• The old mission church was built entirely from adobe.

• Thick walls of adobe keep the desert house cool through the afternoon heat.

Where does adobe come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Adobe travelled into English through Spanish, where it named the sun-dried mud brick used across the arid Americas. The Spanish word came from Arabic al-tub, which simply meant 'the brick', the al- being the familiar Arabic definite article 'the' and tub meaning 'brick'. The Arabic word itself reached back further to Coptic tobe and ultimately to ancient Egyptian, where a related term described the moulded mud bricks of the Nile valley, so the word carries thousands of years of bricklaying history. Spanish settlers brought both the building method and the word to the American Southwest, and English speakers picked it up there during the early 1800s. The spelling trap is the quiet final '-e' and the unstressed middle syllable: it is spoken roughly as 'uh-DOH-bee', three syllables, even though the written shape can tempt people to drop the ending or double a letter.

How the word is built

• adobe (a single borrowed root from Spanish; the Spanish word in turn fused the Arabic article al- 'the' with tub 'brick')