trip slang drugs

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Trippin’.

or trippin [ trip -in]

What does  trippin' mean?

You trippin’  means you’re acting a fool, thinking crazy thoughts, or are maybe high on mushrooms. Trippin’ out is “freaking out” or “being extremely high.”

Related words:

• geekin’
• set trippin’
• sweatin’

Where does trippin’ come from?

In drug slang, a trip is a metaphor for the hallucinatory high produced by LSD, magic mushrooms, and other drugs. The term dates back to the 1920s.

When people are tripping on hallucinogenic drugs, they can act very erratic, which probably accounts for the use of  trppin’  for “acting insane, foolish, or without thinking” in general slang by the late 1980s.

The slang  set trippin’  surfaced in 1990s West Coast gang culture for “killing a gang rival to show off your power.” Set  alludes to a subset   of a larger gang (e.g., the  Pirus are a set of the Bloods ) and trip is black slang for “lose control,” as we’ve seen. Hip-hop artists like Dr. Dre, Coolio, and the Wu-Tang Clang all mentioned set trippin’ , often just trippin’ for short, in their lyrics around this time.

Dr. Dre notably used trippin’ in the “go crazy” sense in his 1992 hip-hop classic, “Nothin’ but a G Thang”: “Never let me slip, ’cause if I slip, then I’m slippin’ / But if I got my nina, then you know I’m straight trippin’.”

Examples of trippin’

Who uses trippin’.

Trippin’ is widespread slang …

The expression you trippin’ is frequently used to call out someone thought to be acting out of line or foolish.

Ain’t no “male best friend” You trippin. Talking bout get some ice cream. https://t.co/V15YB3Ze6J — Keeg (@iamkeganyates) May 30, 2018

The slang is so common it inspired the title of a 1999 film, Trippin’ , starring Deon Richmond as a daydreamer who just can’t get his act together to become a writer and win his prettiest girl.

Trippin’ also gets used when referring to some beef (e.g., I’m not trippin’ over what she said about me). And, tripping is still widely used to refer to being high on hallucinogenic drugs and sometimes just being very high in general.

This is not meant to be a formal definition of trippin’ like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of trippin’ that will help our users expand their word mastery.

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