A-D-M – ‘power to assimilate, associate, hold polarities in relative, antithetical unity; 
unit of mind and consciousness capable of evolution’

…Moses did not fall here into the modern error which has made of man a particular species in the animal kingdom; but only after having finished all that he wished to say concerning the elementary, the vegetable and the animal kingdom, he passes on to a kingdom distinct and higher that he names אדם Adam.

…the etymology…its grossest exterior…only red clay, or simply clay, because the word signifies red or reddish; because by אדמה, the earth in general, has been understood; but they have failed to see that these words themselves are compounds, and that they can only be the roots of words still more compound; whereas the word אדם being more simple cannot come from it.

The Egyptian priests, authors of this mysterious name, and of a great part of those employed by Moses, have composed it with an infinite art. It presents three meanings…The first, which is the literal meaning, has been restricted more and more…so that it is doubtful whether it was understood in its purity even at the epoch of the Babylonian captivity…The Samaritan version, the most ancient of all, is also the one which conserves best its signification…over the Chaldaic targum; for the author of this targum…does not go beyond the material meaning and confines himself constantly to the word איבשא , man. The Hellenists who follow quite voluntarily the Samaritan have abandoned it on this occasion. They would have exposed too much the spiritual meaning which they wished to hide [and] were content to copy the Chaldaic and translate by [anthropos], man; in which they have been imitated by Saint Jerome and his successors.

The name given to Adam אדם, signifies not only “homo,” man, but it characterizes, as the Samaritan had clearly seen in rendering it by [universal], that which we understand by mankind, and which we would express much better by saying kingdom of man: it is collective man, man abstractly formed of the assemblage of all men. This is the literal meaning of אדם.

The figurative meaning…[lies in] the verb here which follows the word אדם …It is דמות, used constructively in the enunciative nominal, inflected by the assimilative article כ and bearing the affix of the first person plural כדמותנו that is to say, word-for-word and grammatically, conformable-to-our-action-of-assimilating. This comparison of the verb and the noun, gives us the root from which both spring. This root is דם, which carries with itself every idea of assimilation, of similitude, of homogeneity. Governed by the sign of power and stability א, it becomes the image of an immortal assimilation, of the aggregation of homogenous and indestructible parts…

…The hieroglyphic root of the name Adam אדם, is אד, which, composed of the sign of unitary, principiant power, and that of divisibility, offers the image of a relative unity…This root being endowed with the collective sign ם, assumes an unlimited development: that is to say, the symbolic number 10 being taken to represent the root אד, the sign ם will develop its progressive power to infinity…(The Hebraic Tongue Restored, Fabré d’Olivet, p. 56-59)