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Pueb·lo¹

(pwĕblō)

n. pl. Pueblo or Pueb·los

a. Any of some 25 Native American peoples, including the Hopi, Zuni, and Taos, living in established villages in northern and western New Mexico and northeast Arizona. The Pueblo are considered to be descendants of the cliff dwellers and are noted for their skilled craft in pottery, basketry, weaving, and metalworking.

b. A member of any of these peoples.

2. pueblo pl. pueb·los A village or community of any of the Pueblo peoples, traditionally consisting of multilevel adobe or stone apartment dwellings of terraced design clustered around a central plaza.

[American Spanish, from Spanish, people, pueblo, from Latin populus, people; see PUBLIC.]

Word History: The word pueblo ultimately comes from the Latin word meaning "people," populus, also the source of other English words like population and even people itself, by way of Old French pueple. As the spoken Latin of Spain developed into the Spanish language, Latin populus became Spanish pueblo, meaning "town, village," as well as "nation, people." The 16th-century Spanish explorers who visited the area naturally used this word to refer to the distinctive adobe and stone villages of the Pueblo peoples, in which some buildings rose as high as five stories. Pueblo first appears in English as a word for the distinctive villages of the Pueblo peoples, and it later came to be used to refer to the peoples living in the villages.

Pueb·lo²

(pwĕblō)

A city of southeast-central Colorado south of Colorado Springs on the Arkansas River. It was founded in the mid-1800s and grew as a coal-mining center.

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

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Semitic Roots

The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

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