Stoned — Cannabis Slang Definition

Last verified: April 2026

Definition

Stoned (adjective) describes a person under the effects of cannabis: slowed, relaxed, with heightened sensory perception, possibly giggly, possibly mildly paranoid, possibly hungry. The word spans a wide intensity range — from mildly stoned to “couch-locked stoned” — and is less dose-specific than contemporary alternatives like blazed or zooted.

Etymology & Origin

“Stoned” originally meant drunk on alcohol in American English — attested as early as the 1930s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The word derives from “stone-drunk,” the same way “dead drunk” or “blind drunk” formed. By the 1950s, jazz and Beat-era vocabulary had extended it to cannabis and other substances; Jack Kerouac uses “stoned” in On the Road (1957) in a cannabis context.

The word predominated over “high” as the default cannabis descriptor for decades. “Getting stoned” was the phrase of choice in the counterculture era. Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (1966) — with its refrain “everybody must get stoned” — brought the word onto mainstream radio. “High” eventually overtook it in general usage, but “stoned” remains cannabis-specific in a way “high” is not.

Usage

• “I’m too stoned to drive, can we call a Lyft?”
• “She gets stoned every Sunday and reads magazines.”
• “That wasn’t a ‘little stoned.’ That was stoned-stoned.”

Register: “stoned” is the safest, most age-agnostic cannabis slang. A Gen X parent and a Gen Z kid can both use it without sounding dated or performative.

Related Terms

See baked, blazed, and zooted for the full intensity spectrum.