Cannabis Freedom Index
← Culture

Culture 43 entries

Language

Bhang, charas, dagga, ganja, kif, 420: the words people have for the plant, where each comes from and where it is said.

A name for cannabis is rarely only a name. It says which part of the plant is meant, who brought it, and often what the people in charge thought of those who used it.

Order
Show
  1. Cannabis plants growing on a farm in Jamaica

    Start here · Hindi, from Sanskrit

    Ganja गांजा

    The Hindi word for the flowering tops. Indian labourers carried it to the Caribbean, and it also became the usual word across South-East Asia.

    🇮🇳 🇧🇩 🇯🇲 🇹🇹 🇹🇭 🇮🇩 🇲🇾 🇰🇭 +2

  2. Colorful nineteenth-century lithograph depicting a Cairo marketplace with hashish merchants, seated customers and richly decorated Islamic architecture.

    Arabic

    Hashish حشيش

    Arabic for dried grass. The word for cannabis resin from Morocco to Afghanistan.

    🇪🇬 🇱🇧 🇲🇦 🇦🇫 🇬🇷 🇮🇷 🇵🇰 🇮🇳 +2

  3. The front of a bhang shop in Jaisalmer

    Hindi

    Bhang भांग

    The leaves of the plant, ground to a paste and eaten or drunk. In India it is the one form of cannabis that the national law leaves alone.

    🇮🇳 🇮🇷

  4. Two green one-dollar US revenue stamps labelled Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

    Mexican Spanish

    Marijuana marihuana

    A Mexican Spanish word of unknown origin. In the 1930s it replaced "cannabis" in American law because it sounded foreign.

    🇲🇽 🇺🇸

  5. A large crowd gathered in a city square

    American English slang

    420

    A meeting time of five Californian schoolboys in 1971 that became the worldwide code for cannabis and the date of its yearly demonstrations.

    🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇲🇽 🇬🇧 🇹🇼 🇭🇺

  6. Botanical illustration of hemp with flowering stems and enlarged details of flowers and seeds

    Greek, from Scythian

    Cannabis κάνναβις

    The botanical name is a Scythian word that reached us through Greek and Latin. English "hemp" is the same word, borrowed much earlier and worn down by sound change.

    🇬🇷 🇮🇹 🇩🇪 🇬🇧 🇷🇺 🇨🇿 🇱🇹 🇱🇻 +4

  7. Villagers rubbing cannabis plants between their palms

    Hindi

    Charas चरस

    Resin rubbed by hand from the living plant, the hashish of the Himalaya. Indian law names it in its definition of cannabis.

    🇮🇳 🇳🇵 🇵🇰 🇮🇷

  8. Cannabis fields on terraced hillsides in the Rif mountains

    Arabic

    Kif كيف

    From the Arabic for pleasure. In Morocco it means chopped cannabis mixed with tobacco, smoked in a long thin pipe.

    🇲🇦

  9. A crowd marching down a street in Cape Town

    Khoekhoe, through Afrikaans

    Dagga

    The southern African word, from Khoekhoe. First written down by the Dutch at the Cape in 1658, later a word of contempt, now reclaimed.

    🇿🇦 🇱🇸 🇧🇼

  10. Demonstrators at the Marcha da Maconha in Rio de Janeiro

    Portuguese, from Kimbundu

    Maconha

    Brazil's word for cannabis, from Kimbundu, a language of Angola. It crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people, like the plant itself.

    🇧🇷 🇦🇴

  11. Wild cannabis growing naturally in Baum Grove, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

    Russian, from Uzbek and Tajik

    Anasha анаша

    The Russian slang word for cannabis and hashish, borrowed from Uzbek and Tajik. It names the drug of the Soviet south, and of the wild hemp of the Chuy valley.

    🇷🇺 🇰🇿 🇰🇬 🇺🇿 🇹🇯

  12. Hadza men sitting together, one of them smoking a pipe

    Swahili; related to Hindi, Persian and Arabic cannabis vocabulary

    Bangi

    The Swahili word for cannabis, linked to bhang and Indian Ocean exchange. Its immediate source and route inland are less certain than a simple borrowing from Hindi suggests.

    🇹🇿 🇰🇪 🇸🇸

  13. Original 1942 United States Patent Office document titled Isolation of Cannabidiol, showing inventor Roger Adams, the patent number, and an early chemical structure.

    English abbreviation of cannabidiol, the compound's international non-proprietary name

    CBD

    Cannabidiol, the cannabis compound that does not get people high. Studied since 1940, it became a word on shop shelves only after 2018, and the law still cannot agree whether it is a medicine, a food, a drug or none of these.

    🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇧🇬 🇦🇩 🇨🇳 🇹🇼 🇸🇪

  14. A dried Malawi cannabis flower beside rolling paper and a jar

    Malawi

    Chamba

    Malawi's word for cannabis, one of the country's three famous C's along with its fish and its tea.

    🇲🇼

  15. Colorful hand-painted storefront sign in Richmond, Virginia, showing a cartoon cannabis leaf smoking a joint beneath the words DELTA 8 THC NOW HERE.

    American English, from Δ8-tetrahydrocannabinol

    Delta-8 Δ8-THC

    Short for delta-8-THC, a close chemical cousin of the THC in cannabis, made in bulk from legal hemp after 2018 and sold in American petrol stations as a legal high. The word names a loophole as much as a molecule, and the loophole closes in November 2026.

    🇺🇸

  16. Historical photograph of a leaf-wrapped cannabis bundle above a specimen label reading Hemp for smoking (diamba), Songo, Angola, and July 25, 1890

    Central African

    Diamba

    A Central African word for cannabis that turns up on three coasts of the Atlantic, wherever enslaved and freed Central Africans were taken.

    🇸🇱 🇦🇴 🇧🇷

  17. Historical color photograph showing patients gathered around a counter inside the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club in 1994, with handmade decorations hanging from the ceiling.

    English; from the verb dispense

    Dispensary

    An old word for a place that hands out medicine, which in the United States became the name of the cannabis shop. The medical word was chosen because, for twenty years, medicine was the only legal ground cannabis could be sold on.

    🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇳🇱 🇹🇭 🇧🇧 🇮🇳

  18. Historical British newspaper clipping from 1954 with the large headline Dope Street above an article sensationalizing cannabis use in London’s jazz scene.

    American English, from Dutch doop

    Dope

    A word that travelled from thick sauce to narcotic drugs. In British English it often means cannabis, but it has never named cannabis alone.

    🇬🇧 🇺🇸

  19. Nineteenth-century engraving of a seated Ottoman Bektashi dervish smoking hashish through a pipe.

    Turkish, from Arabic asrār, "secrets"

    Esrar

    The everyday Turkish word for cannabis means "secrets". A medieval dervish poet was already using it for the drug, and it named the hashish dens that Ottoman and Republican police spent a century trying to close.

    🇹🇷

  20. Documentary photograph of cannabis plants growing in individual pots, displayed as police evidence following the discovery of a cultivation operation near Tehran, Iran, in 2019.

    Persian

    Gol (گل) گل

    Persian for flower, and a name for herbal cannabis whose rise in urban Iran carried ideas about class, modernity and belonging.

    🇮🇷

  21. Front page of the 1972 San Francisco Good Times underground newspaper featuring the headline Big New Push to Legalize Grass above a black-and-white illustration.

    American English slang

    Grass

    American slang for cannabis recorded by 1932. An ordinary word for greenery became an alternative to the language of narcotics and menace.

    🇺🇸

  22. Close view of twisted brown hemp rope with loose fibres along its strands

    Old English, from an early Germanic form

    Hemp

    The old English name for cannabis, its fibre and its crop. Modern law gives it a narrower meaning, defined by THC limits rather than by a separate species.

    🇺🇸

  23. A tall cannabis plant growing in India

    English, from botanical Latin

    Indian hemp

    The name under which the British Empire, and then the world, first brought cannabis under control. It survives in the statute books of dozens of countries that have nothing to do with India.

    🇮🇳 🇬🇧 🇳🇬 🇯🇲 🇧🇸 🇫🇯 🇰🇲 🇷🇺

  24. Two flowering cannabis plants side by side, with a slender stem and narrow leaves on the left and denser growth on the right

    Botanical Latin

    Indica and sativa Cannabis indica

    Two Latin names from eighteenth-century botany that became the vocabulary of the modern cannabis shop. Botanists now doubt they name different things at all.

    🇦🇫 🇮🇳 🇵🇰 🇳🇱 🇺🇸

  25. Historical black-and-white ethnographic photograph of a Twa man in Rwanda holding a traditional gourd water pipe, used in anthropological interviews about cannabis in 1959–60.

    Kinyarwanda

    Injaga

    A Rwandan name for cannabis documented in 1959–60 interviews. The record also shows how a word for a plant could carry social prejudice about its users.

    🇷🇼

  26. A hand-rolled cannabis cigarette

    American English slang

    Joint

    A hand-rolled cannabis cigarette. The word passed from "side room" to "opium den" before it reached its present meaning in the 1930s.

    🇺🇸 🇯🇲

  27. Snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush

    From the Hindu Kush mountains

    Kush

    Named after the Hindu Kush, the mountains whose hashish plants were carried to California in the 1970s. It became the most famous strain name in the world, and, in Sierra Leone, the name of something else entirely.

    🇦🇫 🇵🇰 🇺🇸 🇸🇱

  28. A dense field of tall green cannabis plants among pine trees on a mountainside

    English, from German Landrasse, "country breed"

    Landrace

    A farmers' variety, kept by saving seed in the place where it grows rather than bred to a standard. The word came from German agronomy and, in cannabis, names the old local populations of the hashish and ganja regions, many of them lost to hybrids and eradication. Morocco now licenses its own, beldiya.

    🇲🇦 🇦🇫 🇵🇰 🇹🇭 🇰🇭 🇱🇦

  29. The Chinese character for hemp, 麻, in bronze script

    Chinese

    Ma 麻

    The Chinese character for hemp, among the oldest recorded names for the plant. It also carries the sense of numbness.

    🇨🇳 🇯🇵

  30. Cannabis plants growing on a steep hillside overlooking the rugged mountains and agricultural valleys of Lesotho.

    Sesotho

    Matekoane

    The Sesotho word for cannabis connects generations of Basotho smallholder cultivation with South Africa’s market and Lesotho’s newer licensed medical industry.

    🇱🇸

  31. Cannabis plant growing naturally among garden vegetation in the Vumba Mountains, Zimbabwe.

    Shona

    Mbanje

    Zimbabwe's word for a crop that has grown there for centuries. Near the Mozambican border, and across it, the name is suruma.

    🇿🇼 🇲🇿

  32. Colorful psychedelic Mexican underground comic-book cover with fantastical characters, surreal illustrations, cannabis imagery, and the title MOTA Comix.

    Spanish, of unknown origin

    Mota

    Mexican and Central American Spanish for marijuana since at least the end of the nineteenth century. In older Spanish it is a speck or a tuft of fluff; how it came to mean the plant is unknown.

    🇲🇽 🇬🇹 🇸🇻 🇨🇷

  33. Historical black-and-white photograph showing two Mongolian women preparing and coiling rope outdoors in 1928.

    Mongolian

    Ols олс

    The Mongolian word for hemp also means rope or cordage. Its compounds connect the plant with oil, textiles and livestock tethers; a proverb finds strength in a rope’s twist and in people helping one another.

    🇲🇳

  34. Archival photograph of a masked Hilo police officer unloading confiscated cannabis plants from a truck in Hawaiʻi, published in 1996.

    Hawaiian

    Pakalōlō paka lōlō

    A Hawaiian name for cannabis, literally “numbing tobacco.” It also appears as pakalolo in Hawaiʻi's local English and Pidgin.

    🇺🇸

  35. Black-and-white photograph of poet Allen Ginsberg standing in the snow holding a handmade POT IS A REALITY KICK sign, surrounded by marijuana legalization protesters.

    American English; ultimate origin uncertain

    Pot

    English slang for cannabis, recorded in 1938. Its familiar Mexican-Spanish origin story is plausible but remains disputed.

    🇺🇸

  36. Historical photograph of a traditional Maltese wooden sailing boat with tall lateen sails and extensive rigging, photographed in Malta in the early twentieth century.

    Maltese, from Arabic

    Qanneb

    The Maltese word for hemp, familiar through ropes, textiles and birdseed. Drug legislation used qanneb indjan, “Indian hemp”; Article 25 of the 2021 reform literally replaced those words with “Cannabis”.

    🇲🇹

  37. A lurid film poster for Reefer Madness

    American English slang

    Reefer

    American slang of the jazz age for a cannabis cigarette, and the word that gave its name to the most famous anti-drug film ever made.

    🇺🇸

  38. Harvested cannabis plants hanging upside down from lines in a drying room

    Mexican Spanish

    Sinsemilla sin semilla

    Spanish for "without seed". The word for unpollinated female plants came north from Mexico in the 1970s and changed what people expected cannabis to be.

    🇲🇽 🇺🇸

  39. A long conical hand-rolled cigarette

    Jamaican English

    Spliff

    A Jamaican word of unknown origin for a cannabis cigarette. In Europe it came to mean one rolled with tobacco.

    🇯🇲 🇬🇧

  40. Small portions of cannabis individually wrapped in aluminium foil, photographed during a New Zealand tinny-house investigation.

    New Zealand English

    Tinny

    New Zealand slang for a small deal of cannabis wrapped in tinfoil, and for the "tinny house", an ordinary-looking home where it is sold to anyone with cash.

    🇳🇿 🇦🇺

  41. Photograph of an Amsterdam coffeeshop menu with the Dutch words WIET and HASJ printed vertically, alongside lists of cannabis varieties and prices.

    Dutch, borrowed from English weed

    Wiet

    The Dutch word borrowed from English weed. It usually means herbal cannabis, while hasj means resin; the Opium Act uses the plant names hennep and cannabis.

    🇳🇱

  42. Cannabis growing outdoors below the green mountainous landscape of Réunion Island.

    Réunion Creole, probably from Malagasy

    Zamal

    The Creole word for cannabis on Réunion. It seems to come from Madagascar, though modern Malagasy does not use it; on the island it names a plant, a temper and a book of poems.

    🇫🇷 🇲🇬

  43. Tunisian cannabis legalization activists holding a banner featuring cannabis leaves and handcuffs to criticize punitive drug laws.

    Tunisian Arabic

    Zatla زطلة

    Tunisia's everyday word for cannabis. An older name, takrouri, is the one in the decrees of the French protectorate.

    🇹🇳

By country

Where each word is said. A country's name opens its page in the index.

esc

    ↑↓ to move, ↵ to open.