Much of the cannabis slang Americans use every day is younger than people assume, and it comes from the same twenty years. Marijuana, Mary Jane, weed, reefer, pot and joint all first appear in English between 1918 and 1938. The older words, like ganja and hemp, came from much further away and much earlier.
A lot of what gets repeated about these words is folklore. Where the dictionaries agree, this says so. Where they hedge, it hedges too, because a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest "nobody is sure."
Why is it called weed?
"Weed" first shows up as cannabis slang in 1929, when the journal American Speech listed it among new words, defined as a marijuana cigarette. So it started as a name for the joint, not the plant. By 1932 a Chicago newspaper was using "the weed" alongside "reefer" and "marijuana" as interchangeable names.
The modern use, meaning the drug in general rather than a single cigarette, took longer. The first example the Oxford English Dictionary cites is from Raymond Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister. Even then it stayed a minority term for decades. Printed usage suggests "weed" only began its rise in the early 1990s, and by the 2010s it had overtaken both "pot" and "marijuana" in print.
What nobody has documented is why this particular word was chosen. The obvious guess, that cannabis grows like a weed, is plausible and unproven.
Why is marijuana called pot?
"Pot" is recorded from 1938, and the Online Etymology Dictionary's best explanation is that it is probably a shortened form of the Mexican Spanish potiguaya, meaning marijuana leaves.
Dictionary.com goes a step further and traces potiguaya to potacion de guaya, a wine or brandy with cannabis buds steeped in it, which it translates as "the drink of grief." That version is the one you will see repeated everywhere, and it may well be right. But notice that the more cautious source stops at "probably," and does not include the drink at all.
What the word almost certainly does not come from is the pot a plant grows in. That explanation gets repeated because it sounds sensible, not because anyone has found evidence for it.
Where does the word "marijuana" come from?
The spelling "marijuana" dates from 1918, and an earlier English form, mariguan, is recorded from 1894. Both come from the Mexican Spanish marihuana. The modern spelling was shaped by the Spanish name Maria Juana, the equivalent of Mary Jane.
Beyond that, the trail goes cold. The Online Etymology Dictionary lists the Mexican Spanish word as being of uncertain origin, and notes that because cannabis is not native to Mexico, a native Mexican source for the word seems unlikely. So one of the most common words in the category has no settled origin.
The older spelling survives in one very well-known place: the federal law that effectively banned cannabis nationally was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
Where does "Mary Jane" come from?
Mary Jane is recorded as cannabis slang from 1928, and it runs the opposite direction from how most people assume. It is not that someone named Mary Jane gave cannabis a nickname. "Marijuana" was already shaped by the Spanish name Maria Juana, and Mary Jane is, in effect, that name translated back into English.
The same dictionary entry notes that Mary Jane was also the trade name of a style of low-heeled girls' shoe from 1921, seven years before the cannabis sense appears.
Why is a joint called a joint?
Before it meant a cannabis cigarette, "joint" was slang for a place or an establishment, and especially for an opium den. The cannabis sense is dated to 1938.
There is a popular explanation that it is called a joint because it is shared jointly among friends. That one is a myth. The word's earlier life as slang for a smoking establishment is the better-attested connection, though exactly how it jumped from the room to the cigarette is not recorded.
Where does "reefer" come from?
Reefer dates from the 1920s, and there are two competing explanations with no clear winner.
The first, favored by the Oxford English Dictionary, is that it is an alteration of the Mexican Spanish grifo, meaning marijuana or a person who uses it. The second is nautical: to reef a sail is to roll it up, and a rolled joint resembles a rolled sail.
Both are plausible, neither is proven, and anyone telling you definitively which is right is guessing. The word's biggest moment came later, through the film Reefer Madness, which we cover in our list of the best stoner movies.
Why is it called a blunt?
This one has a clear answer. A blunt is named after Phillies Blunt, a cheap cigar brand whose cigars were hollowed out and refilled with cannabis. The practice started in cities including New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
The name goes back one step further. In the cigar trade, "blunt" was already the name of a type of cigar, and the original blunts were wrapped in a single tobacco leaf with their ends folded into a rounded shape and left uncut. That rounded, uncut end is what "blunt" originally described.
The same brand logic produced several other nicknames. An "L" comes from the El Producto brand, "woods" from Backwoods, and a "Dutchie" from Dutch Masters. The difference from a joint is the wrapper: a joint is rolled in paper, while a blunt usually uses a tobacco-leaf wrap, though tobacco-free blunt wraps now exist.
Where does "ganja" come from?
Ganja is one of the oldest names still in everyday use, and it comes from Hindi, ultimately from Sanskrit. In its original sense it was more precise than most English speakers realize. It referred specifically to the flowers of the plant, while charas was the resin and bhang the leaves and seeds.
The sources disagree on when it entered English. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives 1800. Wikipedia, citing Merriam-Webster, puts English use before 1689. Both agree on the Hindi and Sanskrit source.
The word's association with Jamaica came later. Indian indentured laborers introduced the plant to Jamaica in the 19th century, and the Hindi name went with it, which is how the word became so closely associated with the Caribbean.
Three words with their own stories
Some slang has an origin important enough that we have covered it on its own.
Chronic entered the mainstream through Dr. Dre's album The Chronic. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it is said to have described especially potent cannabis, on the sense of chronic as extreme or severe. We cover the album's cultural impact in our history of cannabis and hip-hop.
Kush takes its name from the Hindu Kush mountain range. The story of how it became a strain name, and the long argument over what the OG in OG Kush means, is in our guide to cannabis seed evolution.
420 comes from a group of five San Rafael, California, high school students known as the Waldos, who used 4:20 as a meeting time in 1971. The full story, and why the police-code explanation is a myth, is in where 420 came from.
Even "cannabis" and "hemp" are borrowed
The scientific word is older than the slang but newer than you might expect in English. "Cannabis" is recorded in English from 1798, meaning common hemp, and the plant genus was named in 1728. It comes from the Greek kannabis, which the Greeks themselves appear to have borrowed from Scythian or Thracian.
That same ancient word is probably also the source of the English "hemp," through a very early Germanic borrowing. So the oldest English word for the plant and the scientific name share a single origin, reached by two different routes.
Why so many of these words appeared at once
Line up the dates: marijuana in 1918, Mary Jane in 1928, weed in 1929, reefer in the 1920s, pot and joint in 1938. Nearly all the everyday American slang arrived within about twenty years.
The dictionaries record when words appear, not why, so what follows is our reading rather than a documented fact. Those two decades lead directly up to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. A plant that increasingly has to be discussed carefully, and in private, is exactly the kind of thing that picks up a lot of names very quickly.
Sources and further reading
- Marijuana — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the 1918 English date, the Maria Juana influence and Mary Jane from 1928
- Pot — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the 1938 date and potiguaya
- Reefer — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the grifo and sail theories
- Ganja — Online Etymology Dictionary, dating English use to 1800
- Chronic — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the slang sense popularized by Dr. Dre's The Chronic
- Cannabis — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the 1798 English date, the 1728 genus name and the Scythian or Thracian source
- Why Is Marijuana Also Called Pot? — Dictionary.com, on potacion de guaya
- How Weed Became the Hippest Slang Term for Marijuana — Slate, 2014, citing the Oxford English Dictionary on the 1929, 1932 and 1949 uses
- Joint (cannabis) — Wikipedia, on the opium-den sense and the 1938 date
- Blunt (cannabis) — Wikipedia, on Phillies Blunt and the brand-derived nicknames
- Ganja — Wikipedia, on the Sanskrit source, the flower-resin-leaf distinction and the earlier English date
- Blunt (cigar) — Wikipedia, on the rounded uncut ends that gave the cigar its name
- Hemp — Online Etymology Dictionary, on the Old English word and its probable Scythian source
- List of English words of Hindi or Urdu origin — Wikipedia, on Indian indentured laborers bringing ganja to Jamaica
This article is for general information for adults 21 and older. Word histories reflect the sources listed above, which occasionally disagree. Information is current as of September 28, 2026.
