1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Adobe

ADOBE (pronounced a-dó-be; also corrupted to dobie; from the Span. adobar, to plaster, traceable through Arabic to an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning “brick”), a Spanish-American word for the sun-dried clay used by the Indians for building in some of the south-western states of the American Union, this method having been imported in the 16th century by Spaniards from Mexico, Peru, &c. A distinction is made between the smaller “adobes,” which are about the size of ordinary baked bricks, and the larger “adobines,” some of which are as much as from one to two yards long.