ENGLISH
REFERENCE

stoned

adj.
C1 Advanced US //ˈstoʊnd// UK //stˈəʊnd// stoned Archaic Slang

adj. feeling very relaxed or strange because of using a drug like marijuana. It is a casual word for being high.

adj. experiencing the physiological and psychological effects of a narcotic drug, particularly cannabis. Used predicatively after linking verbs like 'be', 'look', or 'get'.


SIMPLE

They sat on the couch looking completely stoned.

CONTEXTUAL

He realized he was too stoned to drive home, so he decided to call a taxi instead.

COMPLEX

The film captures that specific era of cinema where characters are often depicted as perpetually stoned, drifting through life with a detached and hazy perspective on their surroundings.

Synonyms
Origin

From Middle English stoned (simple past) and stoned, istoned (past participle), equivalent to stone + -ed. The etymology for the sense of "exhilarated, intoxicated by substances", which originated in American English in the mid-20th century, is not fully clear. It could be derived from stone drunk, a common slang expression from the mid-19th to early-20th century. It is more frequently theorized to be a phono-semantic matching of Italian-American slang stunod (“dazzled, stupid”), from Italian stonato (“out of tune, off-key”). In 1952, Life Magazine listed it in a glossary of bop musician slang, in the sense of "drunk, captivated, ecstatic, sent out of this world" (see quote). This could lend further credence to the idea of the word originating from a musical term.

Usage

Primarily used as a predicative adjective following a linking verb; rarely used attributively before a noun.

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