adobe
[ə′dō·bē] (geology)
Heavy-textured clay soil found in the southwestern United States and in Mexico.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Adobe
Large, roughly molded, sun-dried clay units of varying sizes.
Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture Copyright © 2012, 2002, 1998 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved
adobe
A heavy soil, composed largely of clay and silt in sufficient quantities to form a matrix in which sand particles are firmly imbedded; water is added, and straw, manure, and fragments of tile are sometimes combined with this mixture to provide increased mechanical strength and cohesion when it dries. It can be used as a plaster or be formed into bricks, often shaped by hand in a wooden form, then sun-dried; widely used in Spanish Colonial architecture and its derivatives. Adobe brick walls are often lime-plastered to improve resistance to weather; a coating such as slaked lime acts as a stabilizing agent.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Adobe
(Adobe Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA, www.adobe.com) The leading multimedia software company. Adobe products are used primarily by professional designers and editors. Founded in 1982 by Dr. John Warnock, Adobe helped pioneer the desktop publishing industry with its PostScript fonts. Initially developed for the Mac, PostScript became the standard among graphics and printing service bureaus. Adobe enhanced its offerings with the 1995 acquisitions of PageMaker and FrameMaker desktop publishing programs.Adobe's PhotoShop is the most widely recognized image editing program worldwide, and its Illustrator drawing program is another venerable application. In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia, adding Web-based authoring and multimedia tools to the product line (see Macromedia). See Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe AIR.
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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Adobe
an unfired brick made of clay mixed with cut straw or other fibrous materials, such as tow or chaff. One of the most ancient building materials, adobe was widely used in unforested areas; for example, it was used in building the dwellings of Merimde-Benisalame in the Nile Delta in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. and the defensive wall of Troy II on the coast of Asia Minor in the middle of the third millennium B.C. Adobe is currently used primarily in Asian countries in the construction of low structures.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.