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Cannabis has an unusually dense vocabulary for a product you can legally buy, and most of it was never written down anywhere official. It came out of a market that operated without menus, labels or customer service for decades, which is why a single ounce has at least four names and none of them are "ounce."
Some of it is useful shorthand. Some of it is marketing. A fair amount describes real, specific things that genuinely matter when you're choosing what to buy, and knowing the difference saves money.
This is organised by category rather than alphabetically, because terms make more sense next to the ones they relate to.
Weights and Quantities
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Gram | 1g. The base unit for everything else. |
| Eighth | 3.5g. One eighth of an ounce. The most common small purchase and the most expensive per gram. |
| Quarter | 7g. A quarter ounce. Also "a Q." |
| Half | 14g. Half an ounce. Also "half O." |
| Zip | 28g, an ounce. Reportedly from a one-ounce bag fitting a standard Ziploc. Also "O," "oz." |
| QP | Quarter pound, 112g. |
| HP | Half pound, 224g. |
| Elbow | A pound, 448g on cannabis menus. From "LB." |
| Dime / nickel bag | Historic terms for fixed-dollar amounts rather than fixed weights. Largely obsolete. |
Quality Grades and Descriptors
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| AA / AAA / AAAA / AAAAA | The Canadian letter grading system, low to high. Unofficial, unregulated, applied by sellers. |
| Quads | AAAA flower. From "four A's." |
| Trips | AAA flower. |
| Mids | Mid-tier flower. Usually AA to AAA. Mildly dismissive. |
| Reggie | Low-grade flower. Short for "regular." Older term. |
| Top shelf | Whatever a seller considers their best. Not a defined tier. |
| Craft | Small-batch, hand-trimmed, slow-dried, long-cured. Unregulated term. |
| Exotic | Premium marketing term with no fixed meaning. |
| Loud | Strongly aromatic. Pungent enough to smell through packaging. |
| Gas | Fuel or diesel aroma. A specific flavour family, not a grade. |
| Zaza | Recent slang for high-end exotic flower. Marketing more than description. |
| Fire | Approving general term. Means good, not anything specific. |
Two of these are worth separating out. Loud describes something real: the pungency comes from sulfur compounds that fade within weeks, so a loud jar is usually a fresh jar. Our guide on why some weed smells like skunk covers the chemistry. Craft, meanwhile, points at a set of production practices that are genuinely different, which our guide to what craft cannabis actually means breaks down.
The letter grades are explained in full in our cannabis grading guide.
Bud and Plant Anatomy
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Nug | An individual bud. |
| Cola | A large bud cluster at the top of a plant. The best growth. |
| Larf | Small, airy, underdeveloped lower growth. Low light reached it. |
| Popcorn / smalls | Small whole buds. Same quality as the plant's larger buds, lower price. |
| Shake | Loose fragments that broke off buds during handling. |
| Trim | Leaf material removed during trimming. For extraction, not smoking. |
| Sugar leaf | Small resinous leaves growing from the bud itself. |
| Trichome | The mushroom-shaped resin gland carrying cannabinoids and terpenes. |
| Pistil | The hair-like strands, usually orange or red, on a bud. |
| Calyx | The small structures a bud is built from. |
| Foxtailing | Buds growing spiky outgrowths. Can indicate heat stress or genetics. |
| Pheno | Phenotype. One specific plant grown from a seed of a given cross. |
| Cut | A specific plant reproduced by cloning. The only real source of consistency. |
| Hermie / nanners | A plant that developed male pollen sacs under stress. Causes seeds. |
Processing and Production
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Cure | The weeks-long post-drying stage that develops aroma and smoothness. |
| Flush | Running plain water before harvest to clear residual nutrients. |
| Decarb | Heating cannabis to convert THCA into active THC. Required for edibles. |
| Sift / dry sift | Separating trichomes mechanically through screens. |
| Live | Made from fresh-frozen plants, never dried. Preserves terpenes. |
| Full melt | Hash pure enough to liquefy completely when heated. |
| Croptober | The annual autumn outdoor harvest, and the supply cycle around it. |
| Dep / light dep | Light deprivation greenhouse growing. Multiple harvests per year. |
Products and Formats
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Pre-roll | A ready-rolled joint. |
| Cone | A pre-formed paper with a tip, for filling rather than rolling. |
| Kief | Loose trichomes, usually collected in a grinder chamber. |
| Hash | Pressed, concentrated trichomes. |
| Cali brick | Flower vacuum-compressed into a block for transport. |
| Moon rock | A bud coated in extract and rolled in kief. |
| Shatter | A glass-like solvent-based concentrate. |
| Budder / badder | A softer, whipped concentrate texture. |
| Crumble | A dry, crumbly concentrate texture. |
| Sauce | A liquid, terpene-rich concentrate. |
| Diamonds | Crystalline THCA structures, usually sold in sauce. |
| Distillate | Highly refined cannabinoid oil. The base of most vape carts. |
| Resin | Generally a solvent-extracted concentrate. |
| Rosin | A solventless concentrate made with heat and pressure. |
| AVB | Already-vaped bud. Spent material from a dry herb vapourizer. |
| Carts | Vape cartridges. |
| 510 | The standard threading that connects a cart to a battery. |
Resin versus rosin is the single most consequential distinction in that list for price, and our comparison of live resin, live rosin and cured resin covers it. Kief, Cali bricks, hash colour and moon rocks each have their own guides.
Consumption
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Bowl | The part of a pipe or bong holding flower; also a single packing of it. |
| Rip / hit | One inhalation. |
| Cherry | The burning ember at the end of a joint or on a bowl. |
| Canoe | When a joint burns faster down one side, forming a channel. |
| Corner it | Lighting only part of a bowl so others get fresh flower. |
| Snap | A small bowl consumed in one hit. |
| Cashed | A bowl that's fully burnt. |
| Crutch / tip / filter | The rolled card at the mouth end of a joint. |
| Twax | Coating a joint in kief or concentrate. |
| Sploof | A tube packed with carbon to exhale through, reducing smell. |
| Dab | A dose of concentrate vapourized on a hot surface. |
| Cold start | Loading a cold banger then heating gradually. |
| Greening out | An uncomfortable over-consumption episode. |
| Couch-lock | Heavy physical sedation. |
| T-break | Tolerance break. |
Canoeing is fixable and costs you real material, and dab and vapourizer temperatures are in our temperature guide.
Market and Ordering
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| MOM | Mail order marijuana. A delivery or shipping service rather than a storefront. |
| Oz deal | A discounted full-ounce listing. |
| Mix and match | Building a bulk quantity from several strains. |
| Drop | A new batch arriving on a menu. |
| Restock | Previously sold-out inventory returning. |
| Discreet packaging | Shipped without external branding or odour. |
| e-Transfer | Interac bank-to-bank payment. The usual cannabis payment method in Canada. |
Why cannabis sites don't take credit cards is covered in our payment guide, and weed delivery Ottawa covers how ordering works locally.
Terms Worth Being Sceptical Of
Not everything in cannabis vocabulary carries information.
"Exotic," "zaza," "top shelf," "fire." None of these have definitions. They tell you what a seller thinks, not what you're buying.
"Lab tested" with no lab, no date and no method named means very little outside the regulated system.
Potency figures above about 35% on flower. Physically implausible. Our article on what THC percentage actually measures covers why that number carries less information than it appears to.
Strain names generally. Nothing regulates them, and the same name from two growers can be two genuinely different plants.
The terms that do carry information are the specific ones: a grade letter, a cure description, a micron range on hash, a harvest date, a stated extraction method. Those describe something. The adjectives mostly don't.
Frequently Asked Questions
An ounce, 28 grams. The term reportedly comes from a one-ounce quantity fitting a standard Ziploc bag. It's the most common bulk purchase size and the point on the weight ladder where per-gram pricing improves most sharply compared to an eighth.
AAAA-grade flower, from the four A's. It sits near the top of the Canadian letter grading system, below AAAAA or craft tiers. The grading system is unofficial and applied by sellers rather than any regulator, so a quad from one source isn't guaranteed to match a quad from another.
Strongly aromatic, pungent enough to be noticed through packaging. Unlike most slang, it describes something real: the pungency comes from volatile sulfur compounds that peak during curing and fade within weeks, so loud flower is generally recently packaged flower.
Smalls are whole, intact buds that simply grew small, usually from lower on the plant. Shake is broken fragments that came off larger buds during handling. Smalls preserve aroma better because less surface area is exposed to air, which is why they cost more and are usually the better value.
Mail order marijuana. It refers to services that ship or deliver cannabis rather than operating a physical storefront, and it's long-established Canadian shorthand. Most MOM services use Interac e-Transfer or cash on delivery, since card networks generally don't service the sector.
Already-vaped bud: the spent material left in a dry herb vapourizer after a session. It's already decarboxylated and still contains cannabinoids, so it's usable in edibles and infusions without any further heating, though it tastes poor unless water cured first.
The Short Version
Most cannabis vocabulary falls into two groups. Terms that describe something specific, and terms that describe how a seller feels about their product.
Weights, grades, anatomy, processing stages and product formats are the first group, and learning them makes a menu readable. Exotic, fire, zaza and top shelf are the second group, and learning them mostly teaches you what to discount.
The quickest test: if a term would mean the same thing coming from a competitor, it's information. If it only works as praise, it's an adjective.
