Baked, Blitzed, Zooted: The Vocabulary Of Being High

Nobody had to teach you that baked is stronger than high, or that zooted is stronger than both. You absorbed the ranking without anyone writing it down, which is what a living vocabulary does.

What is strange is how many words for being high exist, how old some of them are, and how few started out having anything to do with cannabis. Stoner slang for high has always borrowed from drink, and most of it still shows the seams.

High came first, by three centuries

The plainest word in the whole list is also the oldest, and it was about wine. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the sense precisely: the meaning euphoric or exhilarated from alcohol is first attested 1620s, of drugs, 1932. Green's Dictionary of Slang carries the citation that proves it, from Thomas May's 1627 translation of Lucan's Pharsalia: "He's high with wine, and fit for Venus now."

Three hundred years separate that line from the first recorded drug sense, which arrives in the 1930s in American newspaper coverage of what the papers of the day called loco weed. The word was fully formed and waiting.

Stoned arrived twice in the same year

The received story is that stoned migrated from drink to drugs over a couple of decades. The lexicographic record says something odder. Green's gives two separate senses of stoned. The first is drunk, earliest citation 1951, Jack Kerouac: "I had finished the wine and I was proper stoned." The second is intoxicated with some form of drug, earliest citation also 1951, also Kerouac, in a letter dated 8 January: "I stood completely stoned on the sidewalk in unbelievable and heavenly rapture."

Same year, same writer, both meanings. There is no documented migration period, because there does not appear to have been one. A third sense follows in 1954, from a Bop Dictionary printed in Mad magazine, defining stoned as a joyous state of mind with no substance involved at all.

Two metaphors, running in parallel

Sort the rest of the vocabulary and almost everything lands in one of two piles:

• Heat and cooking: baked, toasted, fried, cooked, blazed, torched, lit.
• Force and destruction: smashed, wrecked, ripped, hammered, blitzed, wasted, destroyed.

The dates in Green's Dictionary of Slang tell you the heat cluster attached itself to cannabis in a specific order:

• Fried, 1961, the oldest of them.
• Toasted, 1980, from the linguist Edith Folb's fieldwork on Black teenage speech in Los Angeles, where she groups the terms explicitly as "being cooked or overdone."
• Baked, dated 1978 by Merriam-Webster and 1987 by Green's, so pick your decade.
• Blazed, 1992, first recorded in a prison slang glossary.
• Cooked, 1993.

The damage cluster mostly arrived secondhand from alcohol, and one case documents the handover exactly. The slang journal Current Slang recorded wrecked meaning drunk in 1968, and the same journal recorded wrecked meaning high on drugs in 1971. Three years, same publication, same word, new substance.

Blitzed shows where these words come from. Merriam-Webster defines it as intoxicated by drugs or alcohol and dates it to 1966. Its root is blitz, from the German Blitzkrieg, which entered English in 1940 to describe aerial bombardment. It took twenty-six years for a word about being bombed flat to mean being extremely high.

Zooted is forty years old and still not in the dictionary

The word that sounds newest is not new, and its status is the most interesting thing about it. Green's dates zooted to 1982, labeling it US Black and campus slang, with a first citation from Connie Eble's campus slang collection at the University of North Carolina glossing it as "an ultimate high from smoking reefer." That is the closest thing to a settled zooted meaning anyone has, and it is a specifically cannabis one, written down forty-four years ago.

Despite that, zooted appears in neither Merriam-Webster nor Dictionary.com. Both return nothing. Green's is the only serious lexicographic record of a word that millions of people use.

Its origin is genuinely unresolved, and it is worth resisting the obvious guess. The British slang zoot meaning a spliff is recorded from 1999, seventeen years after American zooted, so the spliff cannot be the source. The zoot suit and its jive vocabulary are plausible but undocumented. The honest position is that nobody knows.

The unexamined day is a wasted opportunity. Reflect on what you did, what you learned, and how you can improve.

John Dewey

English has more words for this than for almost anything

There is a reason the list never stops growing, and it predates cannabis by centuries. Harry Levine's 1981 paper in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol opens by reporting the Dictionary of American Slang's finding that the concept having the most slang synonyms is drunk. People have been counting for a long time. Benjamin Franklin published a list of 228 round-about phrases to describe drunkenness in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, and a 2023 study by two German linguists put a modern number on it, with an appendix listing 546 English synonyms. 

Levine also offers the best explanation anyone has given for the shape of the vocabulary. He notes how many of the words suggest power, force or violence, and argues that what they describe being smashed, wiped out or buried is ordinary everyday consciousness. That reading covers both piles at once. Baked and smashed are saying the same thing about the same thing, one by fire and one by force.

Some words describe the plant instead of the state, and those follow their own logic. A strain called Laughing Buddha, a 24 percent THC sativa-dominant cross of Thai and Jamaican genetics reported as uplifting and euphoric, is doing in a name what the slang does in a verb. Tangerine Dream at 27 percent does it with a mood rather than a flavor note. Breeders have been naming for the experience for as long as smokers have been naming the experience, and the two vocabularies grew up together.

There is a grammar for it

The most useful finding in the linguistics is not about any individual word. It is about the shape. The German study behind that 546-word list reported that the combination of "be" + intensifying adverb + word ending in -ed is commonly used to refer to drunkenness. Their participants read invented words in that frame as meaning drunk, even words with no connection to intoxication at all.

Look back at the title of this article. Baked, blitzed, zooted. Now the rest: blazed, toasted, fried, cooked, ripped, wrecked, hammered, smashed, wasted, faded, twisted, gone. Every one is a past participle ending in -ed. English is not accumulating these words one at a time. It has a template, and any verb dropped into it will be understood. That is why the supply of high slang terms never runs out, and why a new one appears every few years without anyone deciding on it.

Baked vs. stoned has never been tested

Everyone insists these two words describe different experiences. The research has not caught up. One 2022 study in Drug and Alcohol Dependence built a scale for measuring subjective cannabis effects using anchor points crowd-sourced from young adults. The scale runs relaxed, calm or chill, high, and then stoned or baked at the top. The researchers were confident enough that the hierarchy is real to build a measurement instrument on it.

They were not confident enough to separate the top two. Stoned and baked share one anchor point, fused into a single label. Users are certain the two words mean different things. Nobody has tested it.

Old words, new plant

The vocabulary of being high is largely borrowed. High meant drunk in 1627 and waited three centuries for cannabis. Stoned turned up in both senses in one year in Kerouac. Wrecked crossed over from drink in three years flat. Blitzed came from a bombing campaign.

What cannabis added was volume, and a set of heat words that alcohol never needed in the same way. Underneath it all sits a grammar that generates more whenever anyone wants one, which is why the list will keep growing long after the current words sound dated. The plant is the same. The words are a running record of who was talking about it. Barney's Farm has been developing premium cannabis genetics since the 1980s, with over 40 Cannabis Cup wins. Explore our full seed catalog and find strains bred for every climate and skill level.