dank
Americanadjective
-
danker,
comparative
-
dankest
superlative
-
unpleasantly moist or humid; damp and, often, chilly.
a dank cellar.
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Slang. (of marijuana) excellent; high quality.
There was plenty of booze and dank weed at the party.
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Slang. (of an internet meme) passé or clichéd; out of touch; having missed the cultural Zeitgeist.
noun
adjective
Usage
What else does dank mean? When not describing something as "moist" and "humid" like a basement, dank is a slang term describing something as "excellent," especially marijuana. Dank can also refer to memes that are played out or extremely weird.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of dank
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English probably from Scandinavian; compare dialectal Swedish dänka, Norwegian dynke “to moisten,” cognate with Old Norse dǫkk “water hole”
Explanation
You can describe something that is unpleasantly cool, damp, and clammy as dank. If you have ever visited a cave or an unfinished basement, you know how a dank place feels. Yuck. The adjective dank is often used to describe places that would have moist or damp walls. A dank cave can provide hundreds of bats shelter, but you probably wouldn't want to visit them. Tunnels can also be choice dank locations: "The tunnel under the harbor was always dank, and the workers constantly had to battle mold and lichen on the tile walls." One way to remember dank's meaning is to think of dark since they share three letters and seem to go together; a dank place is often a dark one as well.
Vocabulary lists containing dank
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
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The Pearl
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"Rogue Wave" by Theodore Taylor
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Pedestrians crossing the bridge pass through a fabricated interior, a cavern-like space printed in 3D realism and enhanced with a specially designed scent to evoke the dank, earthy aroma of humankind’s early habitations.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 20, 2026
Since then, he’s been confined to a dank cell at Beihai’s No. 2 Detention Center, cut off from his flock and his family, 8,000 miles away in the U.S.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 19, 2026
Mystified, he wanders the dank halls of their rented palazzo and the fetid alleyways of the “pestilential city” where canal waters slither past like “a fat, grey-green worm.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025
These are the thoughts running through my mind at 3:30 a.m. in a dank basement on a dance floor my friends and I love to live on.
From Salon ● Mar. 31, 2025
There is little talking in our dank hold.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
Typically, it takes samples from early-90s hip-hop and deploys distorting techniques such as chopped and screwed – the song-stretching fad that peaked in 2009 – to create a darker, danker sound.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 27, 2017
The same sort of fungi can still be found sprouting palely in the darker, danker corners of A.F. of L. For instance: "Umbrella Mike" Boyle.
From Time Magazine Archive
Most discussions about human differences remain stuck in myth, pseudo-science and the danker parts of the psyche.
From Time Magazine Archive
Even if you lived on a hill just above the Bottoms, it seemed lower and danker than the meanest hut on a graded street.
From "The Best of Enemies" by Osha Gray Davidson
In his later speculations, this author conceives that the termination ish forms the first degree of comparison; as, "Imperfect, dankish," Pos. dank, Comp. danker, Superl. dankest.
From The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown
Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl — a pair of boundlessly eager, profoundly unrepentant aspirants to the dankest depths of political chicanery — were watching television together the other day when something caught Burkman’s eye.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 4, 2019
It simply takes this premise to its dankest and most outrageous ends, yielding a version of politics that is, in its way, darker than anything you see on “House of Cards.”
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 5, 2017
Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have been together for more than a decade and have slowly climbed from the dirtiest, dankest of basements and clubs to headline theaters and, now, stadiums.
From Chicago Tribune ● Sep. 19, 2014
I haven’t seen every stinker ever produced, so I can’t categorically confirm that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark belongs in the dankest subbasement of the American musical theater.
From Slate ● Nov. 29, 2013
Preaching the dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our trade - you, who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers?
From Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1 by Robert Louis Stevenson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
