Dank

From Middle English danke ("damp, moist," c. 1310), probably North Germanic (cf. Swedish dank, "marshy spot"). The positive slang sense ("excellent") emerged in 1980s U.S. youth vernacular. By the 1990s it specialized to sticky, pungent, trichome-heavy, high-potency flower — traits sharing literal dankness. Urban Dictionary logged the cannabis sense in 2003. The broader "dank meme" idiom spun off on 4chan and Reddit around 2013, mirroring the semantic drift of "based." A semantic-reversal etymology typical of reclaimed slang.