John Ash (divine)  John Ash (c. 1724–1779) was an English Baptist minister at Pershore, Worcestershire, divine, and author of an English dictionary and grammar books. Ash was born in Dorset about 1724. He studied for the ministry at Bristol, under Bernard Foskett, became pastor at Loughwood Meeting House, a Baptist chapel in Dorset, and while there contributed to periodicals. He settled in the ministry at Pershore in 1746, as the result of a compromise between different parties in the congregation. He obtained a degree of LL.D. from a Scottish university in 1774, and died at Pershore in March or April 1779, aged 55. Ash is best known as a lexicographer, author of:   Ash's "New and Complete Dictionary" was noteworthy for the number of obsolete and provincial words contained in it. It incorporated most of Nathan Bailey's collection of canting words. This dictionary was the first to define in English the previously omitted words "fuck" and "cunt". His debt to Samuel Johnson was demonstrated in a famous error in his etymology of the word "curmudgeon", which he says derives from the French for "unknown correspondent"; Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language" from twenty years before had suggested (erroneously, as it happens) that the word derives from "cœur méchant" (malicious-hearted), attributing his information to an "unknown correspondent". "Ash's Dictionary" is mentioned in Thomas Hardy's novel "Far from the Madding Crowd". An earlier work was:  Other works: