Cannabis

Cannabis is the botanical name of the plant and the word the international treaties use. It is very old and it is not Latin in origin. The Romans had it from the Greeks, and the Greeks from the Scythians, nomads of the steppe. The English word hemp is the same word, borrowed far earlier by the ancestors of the Germanic peoples and changed by two thousand years of sound shifts.

From the steppe to Linnaeus

Stage	Form
Scythian (or Thracian)	The source word, not recorded directly
Persian	kanab
Greek	κάνναβις, kánnabis
Latin	cannabis
Botanical Latin	Cannabis, proposed in 1728 and fixed by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum, 1753

The Greeks learned of the plant’s use by watching Scythian funerals. Herodotus, about 440 BCE, describes the Scythians throwing hemp on red-hot stones in a felt tent and shouting for joy at the vapour (see the Scythian vapour bath). Kánnabis is the earliest recorded word for the plant as a drug.

Assyrian texts of the first millennium BCE have a word qunnabu for a source of oil, fibre and medicine, which belongs to the same family.

Hemp is the same word

The separate hemp entry follows the word from its material uses to modern legal definitions.

English hemp, Old English hænep, goes back to a Germanic form hanapiz. By the sound change known as Grimm’s law, an original k became h in the Germanic languages. So hanap- points back to kanab-. The borrowing must have happened before that change, no later than about 500 BCE: the Germanic peoples had the word, and presumably the plant, long before they had any contact with Rome.

Language	Word
Old English	hænep
German	Hanf
Old Norse	hampr
Russian	конопля, konoplyá
Czech	konopí
Croatian	konoplja
Lithuanian	kanapė
Latvian	kaņepe
Romanian	cânepă
Albanian	kanëp
Armenian	kanap
Turkish	kenevir, kendir

Borrowed twice

The linguist Elizabeth Wayland Barber proposed that the word spread across Eurasia in two waves. People throughout the middle latitudes had grown hemp for fibre and food since about 5000 BCE, and had an old short name for it of the form ken- or kan-. The northern plant had little or no intoxicating power. When, some four thousand years later, the same peoples borrowed a new and longer word, kannab-, it must have been for something new: the drug-bearing variety, spreading from Iran in the early Iron Age together with the habit of using it.

Sanskrit preserves both layers: śaṇa, “a kind of hemp”, and bhanga, “narcotic hemp”, the ancestor of bhang.

A Semitic source?

The anthropologist Sula Benet argued that the word was Semitic, from Hebrew qěnēh bośem, the “aromatic reed” that Exodus lists among the ingredients of the holy anointing oil. Her theory was never widely accepted. Most scholars think qěnēh bośem is lemon grass or calamus, and that the word for hemp reached the Near East with Iranian traders. The Hebrew qanbes of the Mishnah, which does mean hemp, is a loan from the Greek.

Two words, two meanings

In English the Latin word was at first only the botanist’s term: the Oxford dictionary’s first record of cannabis for the plant is from 1548. Its use for the parts “smoked, chewed, or drunk for their intoxicating or hallucinogenic properties” dates from 1848.

So the two forms of one word divided the plant between them. Hemp was rope, sailcloth and seed. Cannabis was medicine and then a drug. The law took over the split: the 1961 Single Convention controls “cannabis”, and modern statutes carve out “hemp” below a set level of THC, as Czechia did in 2022.^[1][2]