c. 440 BC
The first person to write the word down was watching people get high
We have a companion piece about the evidence itself, the ten braziers full of burnt cannabis pulled out of a cemetery on the Pamir Plateau, and the passage in Herodotus describing Scythians in a sealed tent throwing hemp onto red-hot stones. That story is told properly at They Burned It at a Funeral, and we are not going to re-tell it here.
This page is about something narrower and, we think, just as strange: the word. Because the same passage that gives us the oldest written description of this plant being used also gives us the oldest surviving instance of its name, and that name is still, unchanged, in the botanical literature and on the side of every package.
Herodotus wrote κάνναβις.
Two and a half thousand years later, so do we.
Note what he does not do with it. He is a Greek describing a foreign people doing something unfamiliar, which in his hands usually invites a certain amount of editorialising. Here he simply reports the mechanism and the reaction, and moves on. There is no word in his account for what we would call a drug problem, because there was no such category to reach for. The name arrived neutral.
the word itself
Kannabis, cannabis, hemp
The word Herodotus wrote is κάνναβις, kánnabis. It passed into Latin as cannabis, and when Carl Linnaeus came to formalise botanical naming in Species Plantarum in 1753, he simply kept it: Cannabis sativa L., cannabis the cultivated. Two and a half thousand years, three languages, one word, essentially unchanged.
Where kannabis came from before Greek is genuinely unresolved. It is not obviously native Greek vocabulary, and the standard suspicion is that it was borrowed from a language of the steppe, Scythian or Thracian, which would be fitting, given who Herodotus was describing. There is a long-argued relationship with the Germanic family that gives English hemp and German Hanf, though whether those descend from a shared ancestor or represent parallel borrowings from a third source is still debated.
The interesting possibility is that the word travelled with the plant and the practice together, out of Central Asia, arriving in Greek already attached to a description of what it does.
Note what the word does not carry: any moral content. Kannabis is a name for a plant, the way olive is. It tells you nothing about how you are supposed to feel about it. That neutrality is why it survived into science.
1930s
The other word, and why it was chosen
By the early twentieth century American pharmacists, doctors and the United States Pharmacopoeia all called this plant cannabis. It had a Latin name, a monograph, and a place on the shelf. That is not the word that ended up in the statute.
The statute is the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, and the word in it is a Mexican-Spanish one. The etymology of marihuana itself is uncertain and contested. What is not contested is the function of adopting it.
Using the Spanish-derived term in federal law and in the press campaign that accompanied it accomplished something no amount of argument could. It made a substance that American doctors had been prescribing for decades sound foreign, new, alien, and specifically associated with Mexican immigrants. A physician reading "cannabis" recognises a familiar drug and asks for evidence. A newspaper reader encountering "marihuana" does not recognise anything at all, and has no reason to object.
You do not need to lie about a thing
if you can rename it so nobody notices it is the same thing.
It worked. When the American Medical Association's counsel testified against the 1937 bill, one of his difficulties was precisely that the AMA had not initially understood which drug was being legislated about, the language of the bill obscured that it concerned a medicine already in the pharmacopoeia. That story is told in The Seam.
This is why the word carries the freight it does today, and why usage has shifted back. Scientific and legal writing has largely returned to cannabis. The older term remains in ordinary speech, in state statutes, and in the names of a great many businesses, without most people knowing where it came from or what job it was hired to do.
and our name
Why this shop is called Legal-Leaf
We should say where we sit in all this, since we have just spent a page arguing that names are policy.
Legal-Leaf Market is a plain description with a caveat built into it. Leaf because that is the part, and because it is the word the Greeks and the Scythians and the botanists would all recognise. Legal because, as The Seam lays out at length, everything here exists inside a specific and genuinely narrow legal definition, one that turns on a single decimal place and that varies by state, and pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on the site.
The name is doing the same work Herodotus's word did: describing the thing, and declining to tell you how to feel about it. We think that is the right posture for somebody whose actual job is arithmetic.
Twenty-five centuries of people naming this plant.
The honest ones just said what it was.