Ashmole

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The 17th-century English antiquary and collector whose gifts became the foundation of Oxford's oldest public museum
2. A seventeenth-century English collector and scholar of antiquities, remembered for the collection that founded a famous Oxford museum
3. Name of a 1600s English antiquarian whose collection of curiosities and manuscripts formed the basis of an Oxford university museum

Etymology: Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) was a lawyer, herald, and antiquary whose collecting shaped a museum that still bears his name. In 1659 he was given the collection of the gardener-naturalists John Tradescant the elder and younger, whose "Ark" of curiosities included shells, stuffed animals, and artifacts from distant voyages. Ashmole gave the collection to the University of Oxford in 1683, and it opened as the Ashmolean Museum, usually described as the first museum open to the public in England. As a surname, "Ashmole" is most likely English, probably from a place name or a nickname built on "ash" (the tree) with an element that may be "mell" or "hill" in an old dialect form, but the exact derivation is uncertain. Ashmole's family was from Lichfield, Staffordshire, and the surname appears in records there well before his time.