Ranking Our Favorite Cannabis Slang From Least Absurd to Most Absurd

Spend any amount of time in cannabis circles, and you’re sure to be bombarded by slang terms that make little to no sense. 

The language of cannabis is ever-expanding and born out of necessity, but its disjointed origins have led to a lingo that feels more like it was coughed up by a malfunctioning AI application than real human beings.

This chaos can largely be attributed to two things. First, cannabis has been used around the world for centuries. Many of the words we use to describe the plant and its properties are simply borrowed from non-English languages. For example, ganja, a word that is often used interchangeably with marijuana, comes from Sanskrit and was first used in religious texts in India thousands of years ago.

Second, there has long been a need for discretion and secrecy surrounding cannabis because of its legal status. Scholar Jonathan Green explained it this way to Time Magazine, “The terminology doesn’t really emphasize illegality: It is the illegality that created the need for the terminology.” Many of the words and phrases people used to covertly talk about weed developed regionally, leading to a wide array of incognito names like “alligator cigarette” and “camberwell carrot,” both code for joints. 

Here, we’re diving into some of the slang surrounding cannabis and highlighting our favorite terms, ranking them from least absurd to most absurd. 

Stoner

Stoner has been used to describe anyone who consumes cannabis for what feels like forever. Theoretically, it could have been.

It is believed that the word comes from stoning, the biblical-era punishment for immoral behavior. Back then, folks got stoned for everything from public drunkenness to sexual misconduct. It was a way of not only making them pay for their misdeeds but also a way to publicly shame them so that they wouldn’t repeat the behavior in the future.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, people began using stoned or stone drunk as a way of describing those who had consumed too much alcohol. It differentiated those who were at a socially acceptable level of drunk from those who had crossed the line.

It’s unclear when, exactly, people started using the word to refer to those who were under the influence of cannabis, but given that smoking weed has only recently become socially acceptable, we don’t find it all that surprising that it made the jump. 

Chronic

Chronic is used to describe a strain’s potency. A super strong strain is a chronic strain.

The term became popular in the early ‘90s following the release of Dr. Dre’s 1992 album titled “The Chronic.” Snoop Dogg, who appeared on several of the album’s tracks, explained where the term originally came from on an episode of his GGN internet series.

In “1991… Dude came, he had some s*** called ‘hydroponic.’ But we got so m*** high [we] called it ‘hydrochronic.’ And that’s when we started calling it chronic,” he said. “We got so high… that’s the way we thought we heard it, was chronic.”

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So chronic is actually a malapropism of ponic. Unique, sure, but not the most absurd term used in cannabis circles.

READ: How To Weigh Weed: A Guide To Weed Measurements(Opens in a new browser tab)

Spliff/Sploof

In a similar vein, the terms spliff and sploof are essentially intentional malapropisms.

A spliff is a rolled cannabis cigarette that contains both weed and tobacco. The word itself comes from Jamaican patois and has been used in that country since at least the 1930s. In the 1960s, as cannabis culture began to spread more widely, folks outside of Jamaica began to use it.

Sometime after that, sploof found its way into smokers’ vernacular. A sploof is a filter, usually homemade, that is supposed to help mask the smell of cannabis smoke. While the exact origins of the word are untraceable, it’s widely believed that it’s a combination of spliff and poof, referring to the cause of the smoke and the way the filter makes the recognizable smell disappear. 

Bogart

In a dream, blunt rotation, everyone is puff, puff, passing. In real life, however, many of us have found ourselves in a circle where one participant hogs the joint, taking more than their fair share. That selfish smoker is a Bogart.

According to Mental Floss, the term harkens back to the way actor Humphrey Bogart was often shown with a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. He never seemed to be actively smoking the cigarette, just hanging on to it the same way a selfish smoker hangs on to a blunt.

The term became more mainstream when American blues rock group, the Fraternity of Man, used it in their song “Don’t Bogart Me.” The opening lines to the song? “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend/ Pass it over to me/ Roll another one/ Just like the other one/ You’ve been hanging on to it/ And I sure would like a hit.”

420

The term 420 is one of the most absurd pieces of slang in cannabis culture, largely because of its origin story.

Over the years, there have been plenty of theories as to the origin of the word, which is used in a variety of ways surrounding cannabis consumption. These theories have ranged from it being a code among police officers to it being related to the Bob Dylan song “Rainy Day Women.”

However, it actually originated with a group of high schoolers from Marin County, California. Back in the early ‘70s, a group of students would meet at a specific point on campus at 4:20 p.m. (after all official extracurriculars had ended) to partake. They began using the phrase “420” amongst themselves as code for marijuana. 

After graduation, one of the students worked as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. According to Time Magazine, he shared his old code word with the band, and the rest, as they say, is history. Who would have thought a code word used by a group of teenagers would become one of the most easily recognizable slang words related to cannabis culture?