Your Global Mansplaining Dictionary In 34 Languages

By Alison Kinney

A handy crowdsourced linguistic guide to a universal blight.

A t this point, “mansplaining” is a crucial part of the American cultural consciousness— but in fact, the now-ubiqitous term only dates back to 2008. Its first known use was among LiveJournal blog commenters, shortly after the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s Los Angeles Times essay, “Men who explain things.”

Although Solnit did not coin the phrase, she later told Guernica, “the essay makes it clear mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.”

Soon after, “mansplaining” became a linguistic phenomenon, helping women to finally define an experience that had long plagued them. “Mansplain” made its way into the Urban Dictionary in 2009. In 2010, “mansplainer” was a New York Times Word of the Year. In 2014, Salon declared the word dead (the true sign of making it); the Oxford Dictionaries added “mansplain” as an entry; and the Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year.