> as lemmas

1575 G. Gascoigne Certayne Notes Instr. in Posies sig. Tij It is not inough to roll in pleasant woordes, nor yet to thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff, by letter (quoth my master Chaucer).

1595 G. Peele Old Wiues Tale E j b It may be this rim ram ruffe is too rude an incounter.

1870 Edinb. Rev. July 3 They are in form little better than the extravagant ‘rim ram ruff’ romances which Chaucer satirises in the prologue to the ‘Parson's Tale’.

1910 F. B. Gummere Oldest Eng. Epic i. 20 Englishmen of that day had ears to hear ‘rum-ram-ruf’ in no mocking spirit, as well as to greet the harmonious flow of Chaucer's pentameter.

1957 N. Frye Sound & Poetry Introd. p. xix As the secret of his [sc. Chaucer's] metre was lost he began to sound more like the accentual rim-ram-ruf poets he ridiculed.

1983 ELH 50 511 The ‘rim-ram-ruff’ of early Tudor alliteration is for the most part not onomatopoeic or even expressive, but rather testimony to its continuing function as an organizer and tightener of the line.

2002 P. Mariani God & Imagination ii. 132 In observing this tension between the smoothness of Swinburne and the rim ram ruff of the local shepherds..he [sc. Hardy] did for the language of Victorian and Georgian England what Larkin would do for post-World War II England.