Adam in Fausset's Bible Dictionary

("red earth".) The name given by God to the first man, to remind him of his earthly nature; whereas Ish was the name whereby he designates himself, a man of earth (as opposed to Enosh "a man of low degree" Psalm 62:9) (Genesis 2:23). The Hebrew Adam never assumes any change to mark the dual or plural numbers, men. Probably the Syro-Arabian is the primitive tongue, whence sprang the Hebrew and other so- called Shemitic tongues. The names in Genesis are therefore essentially the same as were actually spoken. Adam's naming of the animals in Eden implies that God endued Adam with that power of generalization based on knowledge of their characteristics, whereby he classified those of the same kinds under distinctive appellations, which is the fundamental notion of human language. Its origin is at once human and divine. divine, in that "God brought" the animals "to Adam to see what he would call them," and enabled him to know intuitively their characteristics, and so not at random or with arbitrary appellations, but with such as marked the connection (as all the oldest names did, when truth logical and moral coincided) between the word and the thing, to name them; human, in that Adam, not God, was the name. "He did not begin with names, but with the power of naming; for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as a parrot, from without, but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He gave." (Abp. Trench.)...