Other forms: apprenticed, apprentices, apprenticing
An apprentice is somebody learning a trade by standing next to a person who already knows it. A sixteen-year-old sweeping wood shavings off a workshop floor, holding the far end of a plank, watching — and by the third year cutting the joints himself.
The training itself is an apprenticeship, and you serve one: she served a four-year apprenticeship with a plumber. Today that means a paid job with a day at college each week; for centuries it meant a child bound by contract to a master for seven years, with board and lodging instead of wages. Some of that history stays in the word — an apprentice is junior, cheap and on the bottom rung, so calling a grown colleague one would sting. It reaches past the trades as well: an apprentice jockey, an apprentice chef. The verb exists and lives in the passive — he was apprenticed to a printer at fourteen.
1nouneraA young worker learning a skilled trade on the job from someone who has mastered it.~37%
“He started as an apprentice and ran the workshop twenty years later.”
synonyms: trainee, learner
2nounapprenticeAnyone still learning a craft under somebody better at it, in or out of the trades.~61%
“She spent two years as an apprentice to a violin maker.”
3verbplaceTo place someone with a master to learn a trade — nearly always used in the passive.~2%
“He was apprenticed to a printer at fourteen.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 170 sentences found in the wild and placed 102 of them on a sense (68 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ap-PRENT-ice → RENT
A boy sleeps under the bench in a workshop full of hammers and wood dust. Every Friday he pays his rent to the old carpenter — not in coins, but in one small chair he has made himself. Seven years of chairs, and the shop is his.
hooks ontorent
Apprentice came through Old French aprentis, and under that sits the Latin verb apprehendō — to grab, to grasp, to seize, to take hold of — the same verb English keeps whole in apprehend. An apprentice was never simply taught a trade. He was sent to take hold of one, with both hands, for seven years.
Old French
aprentis
Middle English
apprentice
English, today
apprentice
From Middle English apprentice, apprentesse, apprentyse, apprentis, from Old French aprentis, plural of aprentif, from Old French aprendre, Latin apprendō, from Classical Latin apprehendō. Compare typologically discipulus (akin to capiō); ухвати́ть, нахвата́ться, схва́тывать на лету́, and, for another aspect, быть на подхва́те (both akin to хвата́ть).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA