The Lesbian Lexiconbegan with a chalkboard and a desperate search to find the perfect word to describe a very specific phenomenon.

There is a certain kind of (queer)person who only, or almost only, likes to date or sleep with people who look (almost) exactly like themselves. Stevie Ann DePaolahad met this kind of person. So had many of her friends.

But there was no word for it, so she began to look for one. “I kept asking people for weeks,” she says. And then, one day, like it had been lying out in the open all that time, somebody found it. In the words of the Lexicon:

Doppelbangern. one who prefers to f— people who have an uncanny resemblance to themselves.

At the time — this was 2007 — DePaola was living in Portland, Ore., a place where residents are strongly encouraged to self-publish at least one zine every year.The firstLesbian Lexiconwas a bit of a mess. Lots of copies were out of order. (They’d been assembled by a group of not-entirely-sober people at a party for those born in 1979.)

The resulting Lexicon was a collection of 30 community-sourced words that named very-specific concepts that needed very-perfect names.

Lexis orgasmusn. the distinct pleasure of naming things perfectly.

A second edition came two years later, because the list of words grew and demanded another. And the third edition was printed six years after that, in 2015. It was bound in pink and expertly assembled.

On Saturday, July 27, DePaola and her guest editors will release a fourth edition of this dictionary-that-is-not-really-a-dictionary. They’ll do this at an “art party” at Hit Gallery in the Mission. Twenty artists will also show work based on a word of their choice, drawn from the Lexicon.

Deep lezn. A cafeteria-style mixing of craft, context, food, direct action, and human connection; to maintain radical dyke politics and resistance strategies; the practice of reclaiming dissed and discarded feminist root values in art.

Between editions, the Lexicon grew fast; 30 words became 277. Through the years, words have made their way to the Lexicon in shouts and whispers; they’ve come scribbled on bar napkins and postcards, typed in texts and emails.

Lists of words accumulate in minds and phones and thenDePaola and her guest editors — Annie Danger,Ill Nippashiand Melissa Merin,for this edition — refine and define them.

“Some of them have definitions that seem close, some of them don’t have any definitions at all, but they’re real good words,” Danger says. (She’s had experience. Danger also edited the third edition.) “Or there’s a definition that doesn’t have a word, but it needs a smart, funny word for it.”

None of this is science, and mostly it’s collaborative.

Case in point:“vagenius.”This word arrived at the Lexicon with a very simple definition, something like “a smart person with a vagina.” But a very good word deserves more than “such a silly definition,” DePaola says. “So we pounded it out to mean somebody who is really good at f—ing a vagina, or whose vagina, itself, is smart.”

Danger realized it probably had a counterpart.

Evil vageniusn. a person who puts their vagenius to nefarious use; someone who can keep another person in a horrible relationship with them by their sex skills alone.

The Lexicon isn’t authoritative. The Lexicon is not a dictionary. The Lexicon does not hold — nor does it try to hold — every word that one might include. All four editors say this. Directly or indirectly. Each and every one. Even Merin over the phone from Los Angeles.

“It would be no fun for me,” Danger says, “if I saw a word in there that was just a real common RuPaul-level gay word.”

所以没有“werk.” And there is no “yass.”Instead, the Lexicon holds words that feel lived in and full of meaning, warm words that feel good to say and to read.

“One of the things that I really like about the Lexicon is that it’s filthy,” Nippashi says. “I mean it’s filthy. And I think there actually aren’t that many representations of dyke sexuality that are just straight-up filthy.”

Strap-on soupn. the delicious greywater byproduct of boiling sex gear to spick and span sterility.

Dictionaries are heavy in their language; they’re bound in leather and self-seriousness. The Lesbian Lexicon is not any of that. It doesn’t try to “be this academic thing,” Merin says, even if the words it catalogs describe real things.

“I really like the idea of taking the boring, sterile way that we talk about queerness and transness and all of these different ways of being queer — we always end up distilling (them) down to these socially acceptable or scientifically acceptable terms,” she says. “I love that the Lexicon flips that totally on its head.”

Lesbian processingn. Communication via ‘I Feel’ statements; an emotional conversation of prodigious length and scope.

So if the Lesbian Lexicon is not a dictionary, maybe it is, instead, a portrait — or a series of portraits — of a community that is forever changing. Each edition stretches its shape to describe a particular moment. This time, DePaola says, offering an example, there are “lots more wordsthat deal with race. There’s a lot of words roasting white people or talking about race.”

In the same way words are born, sometimes they must also die.

In the very back of the Lexicon, there is a “Term Graveyard,” a place where words are laid to rest when they grow stale or offensive. “People still use these words. Putting them in the graveyard is not going to keep them out of popular discourse,” DePaola says. But to pretend they never existed would be like drawing a person every few years but never acknowledging the bits that have sagged or wrinkled. “Rather than throw them out,” the Lesbian Lexicon says, “they are kept here to document the evolution and drift of language over time.”

The title — the phrase Lesbian Lexicon — has changed, too, even if it has technically stayed the same. “When I started this project, I didn’t call myself a lesbian,” DePaola says. “I was a dyke and I was a queer, and being a lesbian wasn’t cool. But I was such a sucker for alliteration that I went for it. It sounds really nice. Lesbian Lexicon is so funny.”

“There’s this impulse to leave things like ‘lesbian,’ like ‘dyke,’ like ‘woman’ behind,” Danger says. That’s “a lot of people you’re leaving behind. Why are we making new borders? Why are we not making these borders porous?”

Themanine mystiquen. the assumption that the radicalest gender is “no gender at all” because “gender is over”; abandoning a deeper analysis of gender and biological essentialism for the stylish implication that you’re not really radical or gender hip if you’re a man or a woman; often results in erasure of trans women.

This edition of the Lesbian Lexicon may very well be the last. But nobody, not even DePaola, expected a fourth after the third.

“我不知道当the next one will be,” she says. “I don’t even know if there will be a next one. But there are little moments that peek out. Enough newness has aggregated to document it.”

Times change and words add up until they require a new Lexicon, a set of definitions that, itself, is difficult to define.

Lesbian Lexicon Art Party:6-10p.m. Saturday, July 27. $5-$20, sliding scale, for a copy of the Lesbian Lexicon. Hit Gallery, 2740 16th St., S.F.All proceeds from this zine release go to theTransgender Gender-variant and Intersex Justice Project.