He studied for the ministry at Bristol, under Bernard Foskett, became pastor at Loughwood Meeting House, a Baptist chapel near the village of Dalwood in Dorset, and while there contributed to periodicals.
from a Scottish university in 1774, and died at Pershore in March or April 1779, aged 55.
This dictionary was the first to define in English the previously omitted words fuck and cunt.
[citation needed] 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".
[citation needed] Ash's Dictionary is mentioned in Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd.