Every community develops its own lexicon, and oumen are no different. Since our identity is often misunderstood, having a wide vocabulary is a vital tool for expressing ourselves.

In the early 2010s, non-binary people faced a linguistic gap. While man and woman were clear, specific words, there was no equivalent for a non-binary individual, only the clunky “non-binary person.” The community experimented with various terms before adopting the now-widely used term, enban. One of the forgotten contenders was oumin (YOU-min), a coinage based on a 1700s gender-neutral prefix. Though it didn’t catch on then, a decade later, the word was rediscovered and claimed by outherine individuals, who found in it the perfect name for themselves. And thus, oumin refers to an outherine individual. The revival of oumin sparked the creation of a full gender framework. On the same post that reintroduced oumin, the term oune (YOU-n) was proposed to describe a younger outherine person, analogous to boy or girl. Later, a Tumblr user expanded the lexicon further by coining oumel (YOU-mel) to denote the concept of outherine sex, analogous to male or female. And so, a complete system was born: oumin of the person, oune of the youth, and oumel of the nature.

With a shared language for ourselves established, oumen developed a vocabulary to describe the wide world of gender. Perhaps the earliest attempt at establishing a oumel-inclusive system was the coining of atrinary, defined as genders set apart from masculinity, femininity, and neutrality (the “gender trinary”). While this idea was floated around for a couple of years, some began to criticize the idea of a gender trinary. Many pointed out that the concept of a “trinary” incorrectly implied that a single, third non-binary quality was as culturally legitimized as masculinity or femininity, which did not reflect reality. As such, a new dictonomy was thought up: ordinous and exordinous.

• Ordinous refers to genders that are masculine, feminine, androgynous, neutral, or anything inbetween.
• Exordinous refers to genders that are not ordinous which includes oumen, but also xenen, yonderine people, and anyone else not ordinous.

Crucially, unlike atrinary, ordinous and exordinous are not labels one identifies with, but rather terminology to describe genders and qualities themselves. Around the same time, the term tautine (taw-teen) was coined by an UrbanDictionary user to efficiently describe all genders and qualities that are not outherine. This solved the recurring problem of having to list “not masculine, not feminine, not neutral, not androgynous, not xenine, not null…” in discussions, providing a simple and essential counterpart to outherine.

A common vice among oumen is presentation. In a world that only sees masculinity, femininity, and groups anything else under ‘neutrality’, ‘androgynity’, or ‘unisex’, many have taken to creating our own terms. The term jackalope was coined by a Tumblr user to broadly describe those who present outherine, but are perceived as presenting ordinous due to the nature of outherininity. Another approach is to take ordinous elements and transform them into something distinctly outherine. A trio of terms, named for dinosaurs, describes this subversion

• Yuty is a oumin who queers and subverts masculinity in a distinctly outherine way.
• Stegosaurus is a oumin who queers and subverts femininity in a distinctly outherine way.
• Raptor is a oumin whose very presentation queers the concept of the gender binary itself, destabilizing the masculine-feminine dichotomy through an outherine lens.

Perhaps the most direct act of linguistic creation was the development of a system that maps classic queer presentation archetypes onto an outherine foundation. This system of terms was created to describe oumen whose existing presentation is explicitly outherine.

• Bearcat is an outherine bear.
• Civet is an outherine otter.
• Genet is an outherine twink.
• Leakeyi (leek-AY-ee) is an outherine butch.
• Linsang is an outherine femme.

Having established vocabulary for our identities and our presentation, the final piece of the linguistic puzzle is how others are drawn to us. Outromic (ow-TROH-mick) is the umbrella term for this attraction, and describes anyone, regardless of gender, who loves oumen. Tofferosic (tahff-err-OH-sick) is the term for oumen who love other oumen. Its name is derived from the toffee rose; roses being a symbol of love, and the specific color of these roses being found in the outherine flag. Additionally, four terms, each named after exoplanets, were coined to describe attraction to specific outherinities.