Somebody said he was "jonesing for a Coniston's Bluebird Bitters." I hadn't heard of the word "jonesing" before, though I could understand what he meant from the context. My daughter said that it is used for addicts...when someone is "jonesing" for a drink, or whatever. The Urban dictionary says that it is used to mean "strong desire," especially sexual in nature.

I wondered if it comes from the cliche, "keeping up with the Jones." My daughter doubts it (Could mom ever be right? ), and those slang sites don't have etymology. Does anyone know?

This helps a little.

We notice that the definition writer wrote "Joneses" as the plural. That's probably correct ... one Jone, two Jones .... one Jones, two Joneses.

In the 50s and 60s, Black street drug slang referred to the heroin dealer as the Jones man. There are references to the Jones man, Jonesing and having a Jones in most of the great drug literature, but not much prior to the 60s. It does not appear to be a term used in the 30s and 40s. Some sources believe it may simply derive from the commonality of the surname, to indicate a craving for the common or ordinary. This does not seem probable to me, since until the 60s the term was almost universally applied only to heroin use, and at that primarily in the Black community. The 60s drug culture brought it more into the mainstream, with some of Janis Joplin's early music with Big Brother referring to jonesing for food, clothing, etc.

I also could find nothing specific about the origins. Perhaps someone named Jones first used the term in a jazz song?

Around my parts, "jonesing" is definitely "keeping up with the Joneses"!
Big house, bigger house.
Nice car, nicer car.
Good vacation, better vacation.

I don't know the word, either, but here 's what William Safire says about it.

Tinman

Jo mentions "Janis Joplin's early music with Big Brother referring to jonesing for food, clothing, etc."

Jo, are you sure it was in that form? Until recently I'd only heard of the noun form, a 'jones' as (roughly) a craving.

For instance, the movie Space Jam has a song titled Basketball Jones. That's a 1996 movie, but the song goes back further. It's the last cut on a Grammy-winning 1973 albumby Cheech & Chong, with George Harrison on guitar. I gather that C&C wrote the song, which by the way features someone named 'Tyrone Shoelaces'.

Yes, Jerry, I should have written "Joneses" and not "Jones."

Shu, from the OED I found that the noun "jones" was first cited in 1968 and the verb "jones" in 1971, so they weren't that far apart.