> as lemmas

a1586 Complaint anent Meiris in W. A. Craigie Maitland Folio MS. (1919) I. clxxviii. 438 The prentes boyis ar nocht rewairdit.

1605 J. Sylvester tr. G. de S. Du Bartas Deuine Weekes & Wks. ii. i. 377 My Prentize eare doth oft re-verberate.

1633 P. Fletcher Piscatorie Eclogs ii. xi. 9 in Purple Island When Thelgon here had spent his prentise-yeares.

1666 S. Pepys Diary 3 Sept. (1972) VII. 273 Saying that she was not a prentice girl, to ask leave every time she goes abroad.

1704 in H. Paton Rothesay Parish Rec. (1931) 182 [Unable to] pay off the last moyetie of his prentice fee.

1725 D. Defoe Compl. Eng. Tradesman I. v. 56 There's no body to serve, but a prentice-boy or two.

1787 R. Burns Poems & Songs (1968) I. 60 Her prentice han' she try'd on man, An' then she made the lasses, O.

1853 C. Dickens Bleak House i. 1 Fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.

1881 ‘M. Twain’ Prince & Pauper xxii. 269 His frantic and lubberly 'prentice-work found but a poor market for itself.

1889 J. T. Morse Benjamin Franklin i. 5 This 'prentice lad of seventeen years had already made himself ‘a little obnoxious to the governing party’.

1907 ‘M. Twain’ Christian Sci. ii. iii. 127 They seem to me to prove the presence of the 'prentice hand.

1923 W. Archer Old Drama & New vii. 185 But Love in a Wood, it may be said, was Wycherley's 'prentice piece, and..was written when he was only nineteen.

1963 Times 7 May 8/7 How fine it would be to hear Sir John Gielgud on a stage where Edmund Kean was a prentice player.

1997 Scotsman (Nexis) 11 June 32 He turned naturally to another Welshman, the safe pair of hands who made sure the 'prentice lad did not waste his journeyman years with Glamorgan.

2004 Irish Times (Nexis) 9 Oct. 13 The first [phase]..will be seen, inevitably, as 'prentice work, and the last..as decline.