Adventure games are games that are spiritual ancestors to the game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just called Adventure), which includes most point and clicks, but also the likes of Zork and Myst.

It's very often misused though, I think from people confusing the label as referring to games being about an adventure, rather than being like the game Adventure.

I never heard that the Adventure term came from Colossal Cave Adventure, really ? It's true that it is/was the other term commonly used for this kind of games, anyhow.

Myst was better categorized as a puzzle game, you wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for games similar to Monkey Island

It's a well established term, and puzzle games like Myst are generally considered a subgrenre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

On the magazines I used to read Adventure was a synonymous of Point and Click.

I definitely don't trust Wikipedia on these kind of things, anyhow it could be that the terms were different in different countries or just different magazines

Oh, you're Marginalia's developer, congratulations :)

Thanks, I guess :P