Meaning
Explaining something in a condescending or overconfident way, especially a man explaining to a woman who in fact knows more about the topic than he does. It is informal and pointedly critical: the word implies arrogance or sexism, so it works as an accusation rather than neutral description and suits casual or opinion writing better than professional prose. Informal and pointedly critical; frequently read as alleging sexism, so avoid in neutral professional prose. Regional use: General English worldwide; strongest in online and journalistic contexts.
Origin
The word grew out of Rebecca Solnit's essay Men Explain Things to Me, published on TomDispatch on 13 April 2008, which described a party guest earnestly explaining an important book to her without realising she had written it; Solnit did not use the word herself. It surfaced about a month later, in May 2008, in a comment on a LiveJournal post about the essay, and no individual is reliably credited with coining it. From there it spread through late-2000s feminist blogs. Lily Rothman, writing in The Atlantic in November 2012, defined it as explaining with no regard for whether the listener knows more than the explainer, and noted that the behaviour was old even though the word was new. It appeared on a New York Times words-of-the-year list in 2010, was nominated for an American Dialect Society award in 2012, and was added by Dictionary.com in December 2013 and Oxford Dictionaries online in August 2014. Solnit republished the essay as the title piece of a 2014 collection while voicing doubts about the word itself.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- mansplain
- mansplained
- mansplainer
Usage Examples
- He was mansplaining my own research to me before I could finish a sentence.
- The workshop went fine once the mansplaining of basic terms stopped.
- When she called out the mansplaining, he apologised and handed the microphone back.