The Adam's apple may owe its name to a Hebrew mistranslation
According to an old folk belief, a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in Adam's throat and passed to all his descendants. A 1662 anatomy translation recorded the idea. A linguist later suggested a humbler origin: a Hebrew phrase for male bump, garbled because Adam also means man and apple sounds like swollen.
The bump itself is the laryngeal prominence, the forward angle of the thyroid cartilage that wraps around the voice box. Everyone with typical anatomy has one, but in most men it enlarges during puberty as a secondary sex characteristic and becomes easy to see. The cartilage shields the front of the larynx, including the vocal cords sitting directly behind it.
Its growth is tied to the voice breaking. In adolescence, the thyroid cartilage and larynx expand together, particularly in boys, creating a bigger sounding board in the vocal apparatus and a lower pitch. Because the visible bump is so much more common in men, it has come to be read as a marker of masculinity. Some transgender women have it reduced through an operation known as chondrolaryngoplasty or, informally, a tracheal shave; studies from surgeons in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles reported few complications, mostly temporary. A more extensive procedure works on the vocal cords themselves and strongly alters the voice. Some transgender men opt to enlarge it.
The English name is a calque, a word-for-word copy, of the Latin pomum Adami, which appears in European medical writing from around 1600. It shows up in English in the 1662 translation of Thomas Bartholin's Anatomia, published in 1651, complete with the forbidden-fruit explanation. Webster's in its 1913 edition, and Brewer's well-known dictionary of phrase and fable, both endorsed the same story.
Alexander Gode's alternative, proposed in 1968, traces the Latin to a Hebrew expression meaning roughly the swelling of a man, mangled by translators who saw Adam and apple where the words meant man and swollen. Anatomists formally adopted laryngeal prominence in 1895 through the Basle Nomina Anatomica. In the American South the same bump is sometimes called the goozle, probably from guzzle.
Source: Adam's apple
