Weed Slang: A Glossary of Cannabis Terms

Names for cannabis

• Cannabis: the proper name for the plant and the word used in Canada's federal law, the Cannabis Act.
• Weed, pot, herb, grass: everyday names. Leafly's slang dictionary notes that older generations said grass, dope or ganja, and heard warnings about reefer.
• Bud or flower: the flower of the female plant, harvested, dried and cured for consumption.
• Ganja: one of the oldest synonyms, still the most common word for cannabis in the Caribbean.
• Marijuana and Mary Jane: longtime names with disputed roots, covered in the origins section below.
• Kush: originally indica strains from the Hindu Kush region, now also general slang for cannabis.
• Reefer: jazz-era slang that Leafly files under words for bad weed.

Words for quality

Words for quantity

• Gram (g): the unit flower is weighed and priced in.
• Eighth: an eighth of an ounce, or 3.5 grams.
• Quarter: a quarter ounce, or 7 grams.
• Zip or O: an ounce, which Leafly rounds to 28 grams.
• Dime bag, dub sack, lid: old street amounts that Leafly says have mostly disappeared from store counters.

Product terms

• Pre-roll: a ready-made joint, ground flower in a paper cone or tube, often with a filter at one end.
• Concentrate: any product much more potent than flower, made with or without solvents. Extracts are concentrates made with solvents.
• Shatter: a glass-like amber concentrate made with a solvent.
• Wax, budder, badder, crumble: concentrates with a whipped texture, made with a solvent or CO2.
• Rosin: a solventless concentrate pressed from flower between heated plates.
• Resin and live resin: solvent extracts; live resin starts with flash-frozen rather than dried plants to preserve terpenes.
• Distillate: refined resin used in vape cartridges, edibles and oils.
• Kief and hash: kief is the powder of dried trichomes sifted from flower; hash, or hashish, is one of the oldest concentrates, made from collected trichomes and often pressed into bricks.
• Terp sauce or HTFSE: high terpene full spectrum extract, a sauce-like concentrate made to keep terpenes high.
• Edibles: cannabis foods and drinks, from gummies to beverages. Legal edibles in Canada are capped at 10 mg of THC per package.
• Strain and cultivar: a named variety; cultivar, short for cultivated variety, is the botanical term.
• Pheno: short for phenotype, the traits a plant shows in its growing environment; pheno-hunting is a breeder's search for the best one.
• THC, THCA, CBD, terps: THC is the main intoxicating cannabinoid; THCA is its raw form, activated by heat (decarboxylation); CBD is not intoxicating; terps are terpenes, which give aroma and flavour.

Consumption terms

• Joint, J, jay, doobie: a rolled cannabis cigarette, typically holding 0.25 to 1 gram, according to Wikipedia.
• Blunt: cannabis rolled in a cigar or cigar-style wrap. Traditional wraps are tobacco leaf; Health Canada notes that the Cannabis Act prohibits selling cannabis mixed with nicotine.
• Spliff: a joint with tobacco mixed in, at least outside Jamaica.
• Roach: the butt of a joint or blunt. In the UK, roach can also mean the cardboard filter.
• Pinner, doink, dogwalker: a skinny joint, a big joint and a short one, per Leafly.
• Bong and bowl: a bong is a water pipe; the bowl is the part that holds the flower.
• Dab, rig, banger: a dab is a small amount of concentrate vaporized on a hot surface and inhaled through a dab rig; a banger is a type of nail used for dabbing.
• Rip: a deep inhale from a bong or vape (Leafly).
• Puff, puff, pass and bogart: sharing etiquette; to bogart a joint is to hold onto it too long.

Effect terms

• High: the intoxicated state THC causes. Health Canada lists feeling high, or euphoria, first among cannabis's effects on the mind.
• Head high and body high: effects felt mostly in the mind versus mostly in the body, as growers and sellers such as Dutch Passion use the terms; head high vs body high looks at what research says.
• Couch-lock: a body high heavy enough that you do not want to get up, often linked to having too much.
• Munchies: the hunger that can follow cannabis use; Health Canada lists increased appetite among the immediate effects of cannabis.
• Greening out: slang for having too much cannabis, sometimes to the point of feeling faint and vomiting. Health Canada counts seizures and chest pain as emergencies that need a 911 call, and says to seek immediate medical attention for side effects, such as feeling panicked, that are a significant concern; the stages of being high covers what to do.
• Crossfaded: under the influence of alcohol and cannabis at once, per Leafly. Health Canada says combining them greatly increases impairment.
• T-break: short for tolerance break, a self-determined pause from cannabis to restore sensitivity to cannabinoid receptors.

Canadian usage

• Cannabis Act: the federal law that legalized recreational cannabis on October 17, 2018. Provinces and territories set their own sales rules.
• LP: a Licensed Producer, a cultivator, processor or seller licensed by Health Canada.
• Lot: plants of one strain grown, harvested and processed together by the same LP; Health Canada requires each lot to be tested for potency and contaminants.
• 30 grams: the most dried cannabis, or the equivalent in other forms, that an adult can carry in public under federal law, according to Justice Canada.
• Hemp: in Canada, cannabis with less than 0.3% THC.

Where famous terms came from

• 420: in 1971, 5 students at San Rafael High School in California, who called themselves the Waldos, met at 4:20 p.m. by a statue of Louis Pasteur to search for an abandoned cannabis crop. Their phrase "4:20 Louis" shrank to 420 and became code for cannabis; High Times writer Steven Hager credited Grateful Dead fans with spreading it. High Times first mentioned 4:20 in May 1991, wrongly calling it a police code, according to Wikipedia. What is 420? has the full story.
• Marijuana and Mary Jane: marijuana is believed to come from Mexican Spanish, though its deeper roots are disputed. Its use in American English rose sharply in the 1930s, when it was favoured as a foreign-sounding name during debates over the drug, and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 wrote it into US law. Mary Jane plays on the Spanish María Juana, but Wikipedia calls the idea that marijuana comes from that name probably folk etymology.
• Ganja: borrowed from Hindi and Sanskrit and used in English since before 1689. It reached Jamaica with indentured workers from India in the 1800s, per Wikipedia.
• Blunt: named after Phillies Blunt cigars. Woods comes from Backwoods and Dutchie from Dutch Masters, as Wikipedia notes.
• Joint and spliff: joint goes back to a French word for joined; it was US slang for a place, especially an opium den, by 1877, and was first used for a cannabis cigarette in 1938. Spliff is a Jamaican English word recorded as early as 1936; in Jamaica it simply means a cannabis joint.
• Kush: named for heirloom plants from the Hindu Kush and nearby mountain ranges; Afghan strains were taken to California in the early 1970s, according to Wikipedia.
• Sinsemilla: Spanish for seedless, meaning flower from unpollinated female plants. Wikipedia says the technique was developed in Mexico in the 1970s and the word has been nearly obsolete since feminized seeds arrived in the 1990s.
• Whitey: the older word for a green-out comes from the whiteout weather condition and the way skin turns pale during a fainting or vomiting episode, per Wikipedia.

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