An Engelsaxish Taxonomy of Sexual and Romantic Orientation, Gender, and Relational Identities
I. Our Own Tongue
There is a particular irony, which has occupied the present author for some years, in the fact that queer (hereafter wry) people — those whose lustbent, lovebent, or kindbent falls outside what convention has expected — describe themselves almost exclusively in words borrowed from the academic and clinical medicalization of their identities. “Homosexual” is German-Hungarian clinical coinage from 1869 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny and entering English through the machinery of psychiatric nosology. “Heterosexual” appears in the same paper, perhaps surprisingly, as the name of a different pathological deviancy — namely excessive, non-procreative passion for the opposite sex. “Transgender” assembles a Latin prefix to an Old French gendre root, originally for distinguishing between “masculine” and “feminine” words, but gendre derives from the Latin genus, meaning “kind, type, or sort.” “Bisexual,” “pansexual,” “demisexual,” “asexual,” “aromantic,” “cisgender,” “agender” — across the full taxonomy, the vocabulary by which wry people name their inner lives belongs less to themselves than to the consulting room, the lecture hall, and the journal of pathological medicine.
The Latinate and Greek terms for sexual and gender identity were coined, in the main, by people who were naming observed conditions from outside, in languages of expertise frequently not accessible to those being named, for the purpose of classification rather than self-description. That many of these terms have been reclaimed and invested with pride is a genuine accomplishment, but it remains a rear-guard action against vocabulary that requires constant effort to keep from sliding back toward its clinical connotation.
The present treatise proposes a different approach: not the further rehabilitation of borrowed vocabulary, but the construction of new vocabulary from English’s own native stock, the pre-Norman Germanic roots that constitute the language’s earthly substratum and which the last millennium of Latinate prestige-overlay has consistently undervalued and under-deployed. The result is an Engelsaxish — that is, Anglo-Saxon English — taxonomy of sexual orientation, romantic orientation, gender expression, relationship structure, and relational category, built entirely from roots that are the common property of any English speaker, transparent in their meaning, and bearing the register not of the clinic but of the field, the hearth, and the market.
II. A Two-Tier Lexicon
English is, famously, a bilingual vocabulary wearing a single grammar, the consequence of the Norman Conquest of 1066 imposing a French-speaking administrative and religious class over an Anglo-Saxon-speaking population, and of the subsequent centuries during which Latin provided the prestige vocabulary for intellectual, theological, and scientific discourse. The result is a language with two near-complete synonym sets distinguished primarily by register: begin (Old English) and commence (Old French); sweat and perspire; ask and enquire; holy and sacred. In each pair, the Anglo-Saxon word is shorter, blunter, and carries connotations of the common and physical; the Latinate word is longer, smoother, and carries connotations of the educated and refined. This distinction is not natural or necessary — it is historical and political, the lasting residue of a class system encoded in the vocabulary itself.
“Lust” is the instructive case for this project. In Old English, lust meant desire, appetite, pleasure — the same broad sense that “desire” from Latin desiderare carries today. The word did not originally connote inordinate or sinful desire; it was simply the word for wanting. After the Conquest, “desire” and its Latinate cousins accumulated prestige, and “lust” was left with the pejorative residue assigned to the pre-Norman and the rustic, eventually acquiring the specific sense of inordinate or illicit sexual appetite that it carries today. When later centuries coined terms for sexual desire and orientation, they reached naturally for the prestigious register: Greek homo- and hetero-, Latin sexualis. “Lust” was available, accurate, and English, and was passed over precisely because it sounded like something a ploughman would say. This treatise reaches back and picks it up, restoring to it the plain descriptive sense it carried before Norman and Augustan airs imputed barbarism to the pre-Conquest wordstock.
The same pattern holds across the vocabulary we need. “Kind” (Old English cynd) was the word for nature, type, and in Middle English for gender itself, before “gender” arrived from Old French gendre and was later appropriated by academics with sophisticated training in grammar for the concept as we understand it today. “Bond” — my surname, interestingly, and pointing to my ancestors’ relationship to their lord and his land — is perfectly good Old English for a connection between people; “relationship” is a Latinate abstraction that arrived much later. “Love” is Old English lufu, plain and ancient; “romance” and “romantic” are French and Italian and carry the full weight of the troubadour tradition. The native vocabulary was always available. It was just consistently set aside in favor of words that sounded more like learnedness.
III. Compounding and Transparency
English is, despite its Latinate overlay, a Germanic language, and its Germanic skeleton includes a compounding mechanism of considerable productive power that it shares with German, Dutch, and the other Germanic languages. German exercises this mechanism without apology or limit: fingerspitzengefühl (finger-tip-feeling, meaning intuition), weltanschauung (world-view), verschlimmbessern (worsen-while-trying-to-improve). English has never lost this capacity — “heartfelt,” “bloodshot,” “sunburn,” “handwriting,” “wavelength” are all transparently constructed compounds — but the Norman and Augustan prestige overlay effectively prohibited its use for conceptual and taxonomic vocabulary, directing that work instead to Greek and Latin. Our little Engelsaxish project for the wry simply overrules that prohibition with prejudice in contempt.
The basic operation is straightforward: two nouns are placed in sequence, primary stress falls on the first element, and the result is a new compound noun whose meaning is compositional and visible in its parts. “Otherlust” is the lust directed at others, at those of different kind from oneself. “Overkind” is a kind that goes over, across, beyond the one assigned. “Greylust” is a lust that is grey rather than fully colored, present but dimmed. A speaker with no knowledge of Greek or Latin, and no exposure to the clinical taxonomy, can parse every term in this system on first encounter, which is more than can be said for “heterosexual,” “transgender,” or “demisexual.”
This transparency is not merely convenient — it is politically significant. A word whose meaning is visible in its parts is a word that any speaker can own, use, and extend without specialized instruction. A word whose meaning depends on Classical roots that many English speakers never formally learn is, in a meaningful sense, not fully available to them; it must be memorized as an opaque unit rather than understood compositionally. The Latinate terms for sexual and gender identity require, at minimum, rote acquisition of opaque morphemes, whereas the Anglo-Saxon compounds require only that you already speak English, which you do.
There is a further consequence of this transparency worth naming. When “otherlust” and “samelust” and “naughtlust” are built on the same common roots with the same simple mechanism, the normative and the non-normative are placed in the same plain-spoken register, described with equal matter-of-factness, as ordinary variations of a common human phenomenon.
IV. The Derivational Toolkit
The grammatical argument for the Anglo-Saxon compounds is not merely one of construction but of deployment. Once a compound root noun is in hand, English’s Germanic derivational morphology opens a toolkit of suffix forms that applies fully and productively to Anglo-Saxon roots while remaining largely unavailable to Latinate ones, generating not a single new word but a family of words spanning every grammatical category.
The suffix -er (Old English -ere) produces the agent noun, the person characterized by the root, through the same mechanism that gives us baker, walker, and farmer: otherluster, sameluster, overkinder, wrywiner.
The suffix -ish (Old English -isc) produces the characteristic adjective, of the nature of or partaking of the root, through the same mechanism as English, foolish, and oafish: otherlustish, wanderkindish, greylovish. This suffix carries, in addition, a built-in degree of approximation: otherlustish can describe someone fully characterized by heterodesire or merely tending toward it, a semantic flexibility that the fixed clinical adjective “heterosexual” cannot replicate.
The suffix -ing (Old English -ung/-ing) produces the present participial and gerundive forms, converting the root to active verb and active adjective: otherlusting, overkinding, twiloving. This form is of particular consequence, because it makes identity into process rather than fixed category — “she is samelusting” captures the activity and continuity of desire in a way that “she is homosexual” flatly does not, and this distinction is not trivial. The Latinate terms are almost entirely nominal and adjectival; they allow you to be something or have something, but they produce no natural intransitive verb. The Anglo-Saxon compounds produce natural intransitive verbs immediately and without contortion.
Beyond the core three forms, the Germanic toolkit continues:
-ly (Old English -līce), applied to the -ish adjectival stem, produces the adverb: otherlustishly, overkindishly, greylovishly. For love-based terms, where -ly applied directly to the root would collide with the existing adjective “lovely,” the participial adverb -ingly — otherlovingly, samelovingly — is the more natural construction.
-ful (Old English -full) produces the intensive adjective, meaning filled with or abundantly characterized by the root: otherlustful, sameloveful, overkindful. -fully gives the corresponding adverb.
-less (Old English -lēas) produces the privative: bondless, loveless, and wherever absence of the relevant quality requires naming.
-ness (Old English -ness) converts any adjectival form to an abstract noun without requiring the Latinate suffixes -ity, ‑ism, or -tion: otherlustishness, overkindishness, replacing “heterosexuality” and “transgender identity” with forms that stay entirely within the Germanic register.
-hood (Old English -hād) gives the state or condition of being, as in manhood and childhood: overkindhood, wrywinhood.
-ship (Old English -scipe) gives the relational state and the capacity thereof, as in friendship and fellowship: wrywinship, bondship.
-some (Old English -sum) gives inclination or tendency toward: otherlustsome, wanderkindsome.
Compare this to the derivational range available from the conventional Latinate terms. “Heterosexual” yields: heterosexual (adjective/noun), heterosexually (adverb), heterosexuality (abstract noun), and the pathologically flavored heterosexualize (transitive verb, implying that the action is done to someone). Four or five forms, none of them a natural intransitive verb, all retaining the register of the consulting room. “Otherlust” yields upward of ten fully natural grammatical forms across every grammatical category, each available without specialist knowledge, each in the same earthly register as the root.
The Latinate and Germanic morphological systems coexist in English but do not really mix well. You cannot say homosexualling or heterosexualsome or transgenderful, because the Germanic suffixes do not attach naturally to Latinate roots, which arrive with their own morphological apparatus (-ity, ‑tion, ‑ize, ‑ous, ‑al, ‑ically) that is separate and non-interchangeable. The Anglo-Saxon compound gives unconditional access to the full Germanic toolkit precisely because it belongs, root and all, to the half of the language that toolkit was designed for.
V. Etymological Register
The following notes establish the pre-Norman credentials of each element in the system and explain the semantic logic of its deployment.
Roots
lust (Old English lust) — desire, appetite, pleasure; the word for wanting before the Normans arrived and “desire” took the prestige position. Restored here to its plain descriptive sense, covering the full range of sexual desire without the moral overlay that centuries of ecclesiastical and academic imputation deposited on the pre-Conquest wordstock.
love (Old English lufu) — affection, attachment, care; distinguished from lust by its romantic and relational rather than primarily sexual character, as the modern distinction between romantic and sexual orientation requires. The suffix -love carries the parallel orientation vocabulary for romantic attraction.
kind (Old English cynd/gecynd) — nature, type, class; used in Middle English for both biological sex and grammatical gender, and thus the most historically grounded English word for the concept modern terminology calls gender.
bond (Old English band) — a binding, fastening, connection; the structural root of the relationship vocabulary, used in the meta-terms bondlay and bondhue.
born (Old English boren, past participle of beran, to bear, to carry) — produced by birth; used in betwixtborn to name the natal biological dimension of intersex characteristics, distinguishing it from the identity-based -kind terms and locating the concept in the body rather than in self-understanding.
win (from Old English wine, friend, beloved companion, intimate) — surviving in compound form in English proper names (Edwin, wealth-friend; Baldwin, bold-friend; Godwin, God-friend; Leofwin, dear-friend) but lost from common English vocabulary, a loss the language has not adequately grieved.
Prefixes and Modifiers
other (Old English ōþer) — not the same, of different identity; for orientation directed at those of different gender from oneself.
twi (Old English twi-) — two, double, both; surviving in twilight (between-two-lights), twill (two-thread weave), and twig (forked branch), twin (a pair). Used for orientations encompassing two genders or the quality of between-ness.
same (Old English same) — identical, the selfsame; for orientations directed at those of one’s own gender.
naught (Old English nawiht, nothing) — absence, not-at-all; for the absence of the relevant attraction or identity.
half (Old English healf) — one of two equal parts, partial, incomplete as yet; for partial or conditional forms of attraction.
al (from Old English eall, all, with the doubled consonant reduced in compound as in almost from eall + mǣst) — totality, without exclusion; for pan- orientations encompassing all genders.
wer (Old English wer) — man, adult male; surviving in modern English exclusively in werewolf (wer + wulf, man-wolf), and cognate with Latin vir. Used for attraction directed toward men or masculine expression; the lycanthropic residue is not necessarily a defect.
wif (Old English wīf) — woman, female person; ancestral to both “wife” and, via wīfman, “woman” itself, covering the full feminine range of its original. Used for attraction directed toward women or feminine expression.
grey (Old English grǣg) — the color between full black and full white; for the spectrum of reduced, occasional, or conditional experience of attraction, where desire is present but not at full saturation.
self (Old English self/seolf) — one’s own person, the reflexive; for attraction or romantic attachment directed toward oneself. Note that selflove has been substantially occupied by therapeutic discourse to mean something like the maintenance of adequate self-regard, which means the autoromantic selflover will generate misreadings in approximately the worst contexts; this is acknowledged.
over (Old English ofer) — above, across, beyond; used in overkind in its sense of “across,” the precise Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Latin trans, naming the crossing from natal gender assignment to lived gender identity.
hither (Old English hider) — on this side, toward here; used in hitherkind as the precise Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Latin cis (on this side of), naming the condition of gender identity aligning with natal assignment.
mid (Old English midd) — middle, central, between the extremes; for non-binary gender experienced as between the poles of the binary.
yond (from Old English geond) — beyond, on the far side of; for non-binary gender experienced as outside and past the poles rather than between them. The alternative short form yondkin (using kin from Old English cynn, family, race, type) carries a slight additional sense of community: those of the yonder kin, the group beyond the binary rather than merely the position.
betwixt (Old English betwix) — between, among, in the midst of; used in betwixtborn for those born with sex characteristics between or outside the typical binary.
flow (Old English flowan) — to move in a continuous, uninterrupted stream; for genderfluid experience as continuous, liquid movement through gender.
wander (Old English wandrian) — to move without fixed course, to roam with purpose but without destination; an alternative for genderfluid experience, emphasizing the ambulatory and volitional character of gender movement. The phonetic coincidence with the German Wunderkind (wonder-child, prodigy) is pure accident, though the implication that genderfluid people are prodigies of some kind is not the worst accident of English homophony.
mani (from Old English manig, many, with the terminal -g reduced in compound, as English regularly reduces inflectional endings in compounds) — numerous, multiple; for polyamorous relationship structure.
one (Old English ān) — single, sole, alone; for monogamous relationship structure.
wry (from Old English wrīgian, to turn, to incline obliquely) — twisted, not straight, oblique; used as the umbrella term for all identities within this taxonomy. “Straight” (Old English strǣht, direct, extended, upright) is already the conventional term for heterosexual and cisgender. “Wry” is its precise Anglo-Saxon antonym, already an English word with connotations of obliqueness and irony that sit well in the political register of queer identity.
Meta-Terms
bent (from Old English bendan, to bind, to incline, to curve) — used as the suffix for the three orientation meta-categories (lustbent, lovebent, kindbent), as the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “orientation.” Already present in formal English as a noun meaning natural inclination or tendency (“to the top of one’s bent,” Hamlet, III.ii) and in British informal usage as a word meaning gay, which suggests it has been doing this work in the language, unsystemized, for some time.
lay (from the Old English root of lecgan, to lay, to set, to arrange) — used as the suffix for bondlay, relationship structure; the lay of the arrangement, how the bonds are set.
hue (Old English hīw) — form, appearance, character, color; used as the suffix for bondhue, relational category; the hue or quality of a bond, what character defines it.
VI. The Five Categories
The taxonomy organizes into five categories, each designated by a meta-term that names the category itself. The umbrella term wry gathers all five into a single word wherever a general designation for non-normative sexuality, gender, or relational life is wanted, directly opposed to straight as its Anglo-Saxon antonym.
Lustbent names the category of sexual orientation: in what direction one’s sexual desire bends. Its terms describe the object of that inclination by its relation to the desirer’s own gender (otherlust, samelust, twilust), by the presence, absence, or degree of the desire (naughtlust, halflust, greylust, allust), by the specific gender of the desired (werlust, wiflust), or by the reflexive direction of the desire (selflust).
Lovebent names the category of romantic orientation, parallel in structure to lustbent, distinguishing the direction of romantic attachment from sexual desire. The same prefixes apply, producing a complete parallel series, and the distinction between lustbent and lovebent gives formal vocabulary to the split-attraction experience — so that the asexual heteroromantic person is a naughtlust-otherlover, and the homosexual aromantic person is a samelust-naughtlover, without any additional vocabulary being required.
Kindbent names the category of gender expression and identity: what kind one is, how one inhabits or traverses gender. Overkind and hitherkind name the transgender and cisgender positions through the directional relation of identity to natal assignment. Naughtkind, midkind, yondkind (or yondkin), twikind, flowkind, and wanderkind describe the range of non-binary experiences by their spatial, relational, and processual character. Betwixtborn stands somewhat apart, naming not gender identity but the biological sex characteristics that fall between or outside the binary.
Bondlay names the category of relationship structure: how one’s bonds are arranged, in what number and on what terms. Manilove (polyamorous) and onelove (monogamous) are the present entries; the category is open-ended.
Bondhue names the category of relational character: what the bond between people is, its quality and nature, what hue defines it. Wrywin — the wry intimate, the friend whose relationship is oblique to both conventional friendship and romance — names the queerplatonic relationship. The category is equally open to further terms as the vocabulary of intimate life requires them.
VII. Tables of Terms
The following tables present each term with its conventional equivalent and the principal grammatical forms produced by Germanic derivation. For love-based terms, the adverbial column gives the participial adverb (-ingly) rather than the direct suffix (-ly) to avoid collision with the existing adjective “lovely.” Further forms — ‑ness, ‑less, ‑hood, ‑ship, ‑some — apply systematically to all terms and are described in Section IV. The ‑ful and ‑fully forms follow directly from the table entries.
Lustbent — Sexual Orientation
| Term | Conventional Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| otherlust | heterosexual | otherluster | otherlustish | otherlusting | otherlustly | otherlustful |
| twilust | bisexual | twiluster | twilustish | twilusting | twilustly | twilustful |
| samelust | homosexual | sameluster | samelustish | samelusting | samelustly | samelustful |
| naughtlust | asexual | naughtluster | naughtlustish | naughtlusting | naughtlustly | naughtlustful |
| halflust | demisexual | halfluster | halflustish | halflusting | halflustly | halflustful |
| allust | pansexual | alluster | allustish | allusting | allustly | allustful |
| werlust | androsexual | werluster | werlustish | werlusting | werlustly | werlustful |
| wiflust | gynosexual | wifluster | wiflustish | wiflusting | wiflustly | wiflustful |
| greylust | graysexual | greylusting | greylustish | greylusting | greylustly | greylustful |
| selflust | autosexual | selflusting | selflustish | selflusting | selflustly | selflustful |
Lovebent — Romantic Orientation
| Term | Conventional Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ingly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| otherlove | heteroromantic | otherlover | otherlovish | otherloving | otherlovingly | otherloveful |
| twilove | biromantic | twilover | twilovish | twiloving | twilovingly | twiloveful |
| samelove | homoromantic | samelover | samelovish | sameloving | samelovingly | sameloveful |
| naughtlove | aromantic | naughtlover | naughtlovish | naughtloving | naughtlovingly | naughtloveful |
| halflove | demiromantic | halflover | halflovish | halfloving | halflovingly | halfloveful |
| allove | panromantic | allover* | allovish | alloving | allovingly | alloveful |
| greylove | grayromantic | greylover | greylovish | greyloving | greylovingly | greyloveful |
| selflove | autoromantic | selflover | selflovish | selfloving | selflovingly | selfloveful |
* “allover” already exists in English as an adjective meaning “covering the whole surface,” a coincidence that describes panromantic experience with a precision that is more accurate than accidental.
Kindbent — Gender Expression and Identity
| Term | Conventional Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| overkind | transgender | overkinder | overkindish | overkinding | overkindly | overkindful |
| hitherkind | cisgender | hitherkinder | hitherkindish | hitherkinding | hitherkindly | hitherkindful |
| naughtkind | agender | naughtkinder | naughtkindish | naughtkinding | naughtkindly | naughtkindful |
| midkind | non-binary (between) | midkinder | midkindish | midkinding | midkindly | midkindful |
| yondkind /yondkin | non-binary (beyond) | yondkinder | yondkindish | yondkinding | yondkindly | yondkindful |
| twikind | bigender | twikinder | twikindish | twikinding | twikindly | twikindful |
| flowkind | genderfluid | flowkinder | flowkindish | flowkinding | flowkindly | flowkindful |
| wanderkind | genderfluid (alt.) | wanderkinder | wanderkindish | wanderkinding | wanderkindly | wanderkindful |
| betwixtborn | intersex | betwixtborner | betwixtbornish | betwixtborning | betwixtbornly | betwixtbornful |
Midkind and yondkind (or yondkin) are offered as alternatives for non-binary experience: midkind for those who locate their gender between the poles; yondkind/yondkin for those who locate it past the poles altogether.
Flowkind and wanderkind are alternatives for genderfluid experience: flowkind for the continuous and liquid movement; wanderkind for the ambulatory and non-linear.
Bondlay — Relationship Structure
| Term | Conventional Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ingly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| manilove | polyamorous | manilover | manilovish | maniloving | manilovingly | maniloveful |
| onelove | monogamous | onelover | onelovish | oneloving | onelovingly | oneloveful |
Bondhue — Relational Category
| Term | Conventional Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| wrywin | queerplatonic | wrywiner | wrywinish | wrywining | wrywinly | wrywinful |
Orientation Umbrella
| Term | Equivalent | -er (person) | -ish (adj.) | -ing (verb) | -ly (adv.) | -ful (intensive adj.) |
| wry | queer | wryer | wryish | wrying | wryly | wryful |
Note that “wryly” already exists in English as an adverb meaning “in a twisted or ironic manner” — further evidence that the language was ready for this.
VIII. Coda for Pride Month 2026
None of this is, strictly speaking, necessary. The conventional vocabulary exists, is internationally understood, and has been invested with genuine meaning and hard-won pride by successive generations of wry communities. This treatise proposes an addition to that vocabulary, not a replacement for it, and makes no claim that the Anglo-Saxon terms should be mandated or that the Latinate terms should be abandoned. Language does not work by committee resolution, and proposals of this kind succeed, when they succeed at all, by being found useful by the people they are offered to, not by argument or authority.
The argument being made here is more modest: that wry English speakers have available to them, in the common stock of their own language, a vocabulary for naming their own experience that they have not been offered, that this vocabulary is more transparent, more derivationally rich, more earthily their own, and less encumbered by the clinical and taxonomic residue of its origins than the vocabulary they currently use, and that Pride Month — a month historically given to the assertion of self-naming and self-determination against the names imposed by others — is a reasonable occasion on which to offer it. Plus, when you say them it kind of feels like Woden will show up any second, one-eyed with ravens, practicing seiðr magic and beating drums like a woman, which is cool as fuck and a little genderqueer, or, kindwry.
Anyway, an Engelsaxish vocabulary is not borrowed ground. It belongs, on historical and etymological principle, to every speaker of English equally, and it requires no reclamation because it was never weaponized. “Wry” was never shouted as an insult. “Otherlust” has no DSM entry. “Overkind” was never a pathology code. They are simply descriptions, in plain simple English, of plain human variations, which is what, after all, these things are.
The language is, in the final analysis, a commons. The Normans arrived, and the Augustans consolidated, and certain parts of that commons were enclosed by prestige, and the pre-Norman wordstock was left with the pejorative residue of the rustic and the morally suspect. This project is a small act of unenclosure: taking back, for common and unencumbered use, the part of the commons that was always ours. It is Pride Month, these words are offered freely. Sprinkle them like seeds if you will.