stoned

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.