Dictionary.com just added more than 500 new words. Here are the gayest entries.

It’s no secret that queer people have our own vocabulary, and chatting with other LGBTQ+ folks can feel like sharing a native language. Sometimes, the mainstream world catches onto our lexicon and queer lingo starts to show up in unexpected places — including the dictionary.

Every six months or so, Dictionary.com expands its collection of definitions to reflect the modern world. Its latest update adds 566 new entries, 348 new definitions to existing words, and 2,256 revisions to existing definitions. Among all that fodder for word nerds are new problems (like “sextortion”), new technologies (like “generative AI”), and new trends (like taking a “coffee nap”). And, of course, there are new words to reflect our ever-expanding ideas about gender and sexuality.

These are the queerest new words to join the dictionary, along with how they might pop up in pop culture.

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gay marry

“verb. to marry a person of the same gender.”

This one might feel a tad redundant. Is gay marrying someone all that different from simply marrying them? But for those times when we want to draw a distinction, for political reasons or otherwise, it’s nice to have an explicitly queer expression of matrimony.

Some recent celebrities who got gay married include comedian Matteo Lane and dancer Rodrigo Aburto, Drag Race winner Yvie Oddly and “some guy [she] met on Grindr,” and The White Lotus star Lukas Gage and celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton after a whirlwind romance.

amalgagender

“adjective. noting or relating to a person whose gender identity is linked to or impacted by the fact that they are intersex.”

Intersex itself is already an adjective — meaning “noting or relating to a person, animal, or plant having reproductive organs, genitals, hormones, or chromosomal patterns that do not fall under typical definitions of male and female,” in Dictionary.com terms — but amalgagender falls under the intersex umbrella. Two examples of amalgagender identities are intergirl and interboy.

stealth

“adjective. (of a transgender person) living as a cisgender member of one’s identified gender, without revealing that one is transgender.”

Given the disproportionate rates of violence and discrimination trans people face, being stealth is sometimes a necessity for safety. The term being added to the dictionary also reflects that trans folks, like all queer people, don’t need to disclose their identities if they don’t want to.

One trans celebrity who was stealth until recently is beauty guru Nikkie de Jager, aka NikkieTutorials, who came out as trans in 2020, more than a decade into her YouTube career, after being blackmailed. In her coming out video, titled I’m Coming Out, she said, “Filming this video is scary, but it feels so liberating and freeing. I’ve been wanting to share this side of myself to all of you for so long, but I could never figure out the timing.”

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polysexual

“adjective. noting or relating to a person who is sexually attracted to people of various genders, but not necessarily to people of all genders.”

Polysexuality is similar to pansexuality and bisexuality, but not quite the same. It’s all in those prefixes: “pan” means all, “bi” means two, and “poly” means many. So, where pansexual folks are attracted to all genders and bisexual people are attracted to two genders, polysexual people are attracted to several, but not all, genders. (Of course, that’s just going by the strict definitions, and many people have personal definitions for these identities, which are equally valid.)

There are few celebrities actively identifying as polysexual, but one example is Pose star Indya Moore, who came out as poly on X (then Twitter) in 2018. When asked if they meant polyamorous or polysexual, they simply replied with an asterisk, indicating they’re poly in every sense of the term.

Dictionary.com also added the similar term polyromantic, which indicates romantic attraction instead of sexual attraction.

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What Does it Mean to be Polysexual?

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In addition to these new definitions, Dictionary.com implemented a dictionary-wide update to be more gender-inclusive. All instances of the phrase “his or her” in definitions have been replaced with “their,” and other unnecessarily gendered definitions have also been revised to be more inclusive.

“This change was made for two reasons: inclusivity and usage,” wrote lexicographer K. E. Callaway. “On the inclusivity side, his or her does not include people who use other pronouns. In terms of usage, they is simply much more common as a generic pronoun than he or she, including in spoken and all, but the most formal types of written English. In fact, this has been the case for decades (even though people rarely notice it in speech).”

“By making this change, we have made our entries more similar to how people actually speak and write, hopefully making the entries more natural-sounding — and thus more accessible to readers,” Callaway continued.