# forbidden fruit

idiom

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/forbidden-fruit
Updated: 2026-08-10

## Meaning

Illicit pleasure.

## Examples

- He knew the forbidden fruit was not for him.
- She felt a thrill whenever she checked her ex's social media, treating the information like forbidden fruit.
- The young scholar found the restricted archives to be forbidden fruit, yet the temptation to uncover the hidden history proved impossible to resist.

## Origin

The phrase comes from the Eden narrative in Genesis 2-3. God places the man and woman in the garden and permits them everything except the fruit of one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A serpent persuades them to eat it anyway, and the eating brings shame, exile, and the loss of the garden. It is worth noting that Genesis never actually names the fruit an apple; that detail is a later European accretion, helped along by the Latin pun between malum (evil) and malus (apple). The text itself says only that the fruit was forbidden. In its original setting the point is not the fruit but the prohibition: the one thing withheld becomes the one thing desired. That is the seed of the modern meaning. By the time the phrase settled into English it had loosened from the theology entirely. Today forbidden fruit names anything made more tempting precisely because it is off-limits, from a banned book to an illicit romance. The pull is in the ban, not the object.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.