Adobe is a building material: earth, often mixed with straw, shaped into bricks and dried in the sun — not baked in a hot oven. Houses of adobe are common in dry, hot places, such as the American Southwest and parts of Latin America, because thick earth walls stay cool in the day and hold heat at night. People also say an adobe house or adobe bricks. It is an ordinary noun for the material, not a fancy or technical word in those places. The word came into English from Spanish, and before that from Arabic, and before that from older Egyptian words for ‘brick.’ Though actually, many students in Taiwan meet Adobe first as the software company. That is the same spelling and a different story; this entry is the earth brick.