(pwĕbˈlō)
noun pl. pueblo Pueblo or
Pueb·los a. Any of some 25 Native American peoples, including the Hopi, Zuñi, 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-dwelling Anasazi peoples and are noted for their skilled craft in pottery, basketry, weaving, and metalworking.
b. A member of any of these peoples.
- pueblo pl. pueb·los A permanent village or community of any of the Pueblo peoples, typically consisting of multilevel adobe or stone apartment dwellings of terraced design clustered around a central plaza.
Word History: The identity of the Pueblo peoples is undeniably connected to the stone and adobe dwellings they have occupied for more than 700 years—especially from an etymological point of view. Originally coming from the Latin word
populus, “people, nation,” the Spanish word
pueblo, meaning “town, village,” as well as “nation, people,” was naturally used by 16th-century Spanish explorers to refer to villages that they discovered or founded in the Southwest. The English word
pueblo is first recorded in an American text in this sense in 1808, marking it as an Americanism. The distinctive adobe or stone villages of the Pueblo peoples, with some buildings rising as high as five stories, must have impressed the Spaniards considerably, because
pueblo came to be applied to the inhabitants as well as the village, perhaps in honor of their architectural achievements or simply as an obvious way to distinguish the Pueblo from other Native American peoples. The first recorded usage of this sense is found in 1834.
