Entered Apprentice is the first of the three Craft degrees of Freemasonry, the initial rank conferred on a newly made Mason, preceding Fellow Craft and Master Mason. The three degree structure reached its settled modern form only gradually: early eighteenth century Masonic lodges, tracing to the 1717 founding of the Grand Lodge of England, worked with a simpler two grade system before a third, distinct degree separated out over the following decades, a development documented in the broader scholarship on Masonic origins and on Freemasonry's uneasy relationship with eighteenth century politics and the state.
Every other regular Masonic body assumes this degree as its foundation. The York Rite and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite both require a candidate to already hold the Master Mason degree, the third of the three, before admission, which means Entered Apprentice sits at the base of every appendant body's membership requirement even though it confers no further degree itself. Freemasonry's own literature is explicit that everything beyond the three Craft degrees is an addition to Craft membership rather than a rank standing above it.
The degree's name reflects an older, operative history that predates speculative Freemasonry: stonemasons' guilds recognized an apprentice as a worker still learning the trade, a rank the speculative lodges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried over as the first stage of moral and symbolic instruction rather than of manual training.