ADAM'S APPLE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Adam's apple

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/ˈædəmz ˈæpəl/ Listen

noun

Adam n.

The name given in the Bible to the first man, the progenitor of the human race.

(As a symbol) "Original sin;" human frailty. "And whipped the offending Adam out of him."

Adam's ale, water. (Coll.)

Adam's apple.

(Bot.)

(a)

A species of banana (Musa paradisiaca). It attains a height of twenty feet or more.

(b)

A species of lime (Citris limetta).

The projection formed by the thyroid cartilage in the neck. It is particularly prominent in males, and is so called from a notion that it was caused by the forbidden fruit (an apple) sticking in the throat of our first parent.

Adam's flannel (Bot.), the mullein (Verbascum thapsus).

Adam's needle (Bot.), the popular name of a genus (Yucca) of liliaceous plants.

Adam's apple n. See under Adam.

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Etymology of 'Adam's apple'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Adam's apple" Quotes from Famous Books

... the mettle of their man! Maurice swallowed once; he swallowed twice—and thrice—and he continued to swallow! No Adam's apple was sculptured on that juvenile throat, but the internal progress of the liquid was not a whit the less visible. His eyes gleamed with cunning and malicious triumph, sidewise, at the stunned conspirators; he was fulfilling the conditions ...

— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... consequently that they are distinct. He mentions two other forms cultivated in Japan and Java, which he ranks as undoubted species; he speaks rather more doubtfully about the shaddock, which varies much, and has not been found wild; and finally he considers some forms, such as Adam's apple and the ...

— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... Grundy began, but Wilcox cut off his run. It was a shame. I still felt like pushing the man's Adam's apple through his medulla oblongata. ...

— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... unctuous-grotesque; Mr. VINCENT STERNROYD sketched a portrait of a nut-consuming impenitent disarmamentist. The author is the first, so far as I know, to give public emphasis to the queer fact of natural history that there is some connection between extreme opinions and the prominence of the Adam's apple of the holder of them—a fact on which I have ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various

... where the direction is oblique, is this at all unusual. Indeed, the learned Henner gives us a most remarkable—I had almost said an incredible—case of a soldier's neck, where the bullet, entering at the part called Adam's Apple—" ...

— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

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