> as lemmas

1889 A. Barrère & C. G. Leland Dict. Slang I. 241/1 Cherry (thieves), a young girl.

1926 W. Faulkner Soldiers' Pay viii. 288 ‘If that's the only way you got to get a wife you'd better pick out another one’... ‘Atalanta’, she suggested... ‘Try an apple next time’... ‘Or a cherry’..said Jones viciously.]

1928 J. B. Wharton Squad iv. 132 I told him he wuz too young to lose his cherry.

1935 J. Hargan Gloss. Prison Lang. 2 Cherry, virgin.

1953 S. Bellow Adventures of Augie March v. 79 She now held off my hands and now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still cherry.

1959 M. Richler Apprenticeship Duddy Kravitz i. xii. 79 Gin excites them. Horseback riding gives them hot pants too. Cherries are trouble, but married ones miss it something terrible.

1963 T. Pynchon V. vi. 145 Fina was lying in the bathtub, seductive... ‘Benny, I'm cherry. I want it to be you.’

1964 Amer. Speech 39 117 Associated with the growing heterosexual awareness of high-school students are such words as cherry, which in appropriate contexts takes on the familiar slang meaning ‘hymen’, while a cherry-buster, logically, is ‘a professional deflowerer’.

1975 R. H. Rimmer Premar Exper. (1976) i. 27 The day I lost my cherry didn't amount to much, anyway.

1977 E. J. Trimmer et al. Visual Dict. Sex (1978) vi. 77 ‘To take or eat a cherry’ means to deflower a virgin.

1983 Maledicta 1982 6 256 Cherry girl, a virgin. It was a common joke among American soldiers in Vietnam that ‘the only cherry you're gonna get while you're here's the one you get in your drink.’