Apprentice

How to spell apprentice

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce apprentice

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does apprentice mean?

1. nounA person who is learning a skilled trade by working under a qualified practitioner.
2. verbTo place or bind someone as a learner under a skilled tradesperson.

Apprentice in a sentence

• noun

  The electrician hired a new apprentice to help on weekday jobs.

• verb

  His parents agreed to apprentice him to a local blacksmith.

• noun

  As an apprentice, she spent three years learning carpentry before qualifying.

• verb

  The guild would often apprentice teenagers to master craftsmen.

Where does apprentice come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from Old French, where aprentis meant a learner or beginner, someone just starting to grasp a craft. The French form grew from the verb aprendre, meaning 'to learn', which itself descends from the Latin apprehendere, literally 'to seize' or 'to grasp', built from ad- 'to' and prehendere 'to take hold of'. The underlying idea is lovely and practical: to learn a trade is to take hold of it with your own hands. English adopted the word in the 1300s for a young person legally bound to a master to learn a skilled craft, and over the centuries the legal indenture faded while the sense of a supervised learner stayed. The same prehendere root sits inside 'comprehend' and 'apprehend', and the doubled p in apprentice is a fossil of that ad- prefix flattening against the p of the root.

How the word is built

• ap- (variant of ad-: to)
• prentice (from Old French aprentis: learner, ultimately from Latin apprehendere: to grasp, learn)