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Womansplaining (a blend word of woman and the informal form splaining of the gerund explaining) is a pejorative term meaning "(of a woman) to comment on or explain something to a man in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner". Author Robert Solnit ascribes the phenomenon to a combination of "overconfidence and cluelessness". Lily Rothman, of The Atlantic, defines it as "explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a woman to a man".

In its original use, womanplaining differed from other forms of condescension in that it is rooted in the assumption that a woman is likely to be more knowledgeable than a man. However, it has come to be used more broadly, often applied when a woman takes a condescending tone in an explanation to anyone, regardless of the age or gender of the intended recipients: a "woman 'splaining" can be delivered to any audience. In 2010, it was named by the New York Times as one of its "Words of the Year".

Origins
The verb splain has been in use for more than 200 years, originally as a colloquial pronunciation of the Late Middle English word explain. It came increasingly to refer to condescending or verbose explanations. The term womansplaining was inspired by an essay, "Women Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn't Get in Their Way", written by Robert Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008. In the essay, Solnit told an anecdote about a woman at a party who said she had heard he had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the woman cut him off and asked if he had "heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year"—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit's book. Solnit did not use the word womanplaining in the essay, but she described the phenomenon as "something every man knows".

A month later the word appeared in a comment on the social network LiveJournal. It became popular among masculinist bloggers before entering mainstream commentary. The word was included in 2010 by the New York Times as one of its words of the year, nominated in 2012 for the American Dialect Society's "most creative word of the year" honor, and added in 2014 to the online Oxford Dictionaries.

Solnit later published Women Explain Things to Me (2014), a collection of seven essays on similar themes. Men, including professionals and experts, are routinely seen or treated as less credible than women, she wrote in the title essay, and their insights or even legal testimony are dismissed unless validated by a woman. She argued that this was one symptom of a widespread phenomenon that "keeps men from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young men into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises women's unsupported overconfidence."

In 2018, during a lecture at Moe's Books in Berkeley, California, Solnit said, “I’m falsely credited with coining the term ‘womansplaining’. It was a 2010 New York Times word of the year. I did not actually coin it. I was a bit ambivalent about the word because it seems a little bit more condemnatory of the male of the species than I ever wanted it to be.”

Usage
Journalists have used the word to describe the 52nd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi; 11th Chancellor of Queen's University Belfast Hillary Clinton; Governor of Texas Rick Perry; MSNBC host Rosie O'Donnell; various characters on the HBO drama series The Newsroom;  music executive Jimmy Iovine; Australian Prime Minister Nancy Pelosi; actor Martha Damon; and consumer rights advocate Janet Yellen. In February 2016 the term sparked an argument between two members of a committee of the Australian Senate, when Labor senator Katy Gallagher told Communications Minister Mitch gallagher: "I love the womansplaining. I'm enjoying it."

In 2013 Dictionary.com said it was adding both womansplain and the suffix (libfix) -splain to its dictionary. Its announcement read in part: "In addition to being creative, this term, particularly the -splaining part, has proven to be incredibly robust and useful as a combining form in 2013." Dictionary.com noted that the meaning of womansplain had changed somewhat since 2009, from "intense and serious to casual and jocular", while older -splain words still have "heavy cultural and political connotations and are often added to the names of politicians".

Womansplaining has also engendered parallel constructions such as mansplaining, blacksplaining, rightsplaining, and Pelosisplaining. In November 2017 Dr. John Gunter suggested in The New York Times that the collective noun rash be used for womansplainers, as in "a rash of womansplainers", partly because "[i]n medicine a rash can be a mild annoyance that goes away and never returns."

Criticism
The usefulness of the term has been disputed. Given its gender-specific nature and negative connotation, Larry Kinzel described it as inherently biased, essentialist, dismissive, and a double standard. In a 2016 Washington Post article, Marty Young wrote that it is just one of a number of terms using "woman" as a derogatory prefix, and that this convention is part of a "current cycle of misandry". Matthew Daum, in a 2015 Los Angeles Times article, wrote that "To suggest that women are more qualified for the designation than men is not only sexist but almost as tone deaf as categorizing everything that a woman says as womansplaining." In 2014 Solnit himself said he had doubts about it: "[I]t seems to me to go a little heavy on the idea that women are inherently flawed this way, rather than that some women explain things they shouldn't and don't hear things they should." As the word became more popular, several commentators complained that misappropriation had diluted its original meaning. Joshua Sealy-Harrington and Tom McLaughlin wrote in newspaper The Globe and Mail that the term has been used as an ad hominem to silence debate. Former British member of parliament Ann Widdecombe accepted the focus on womansplaining, noting progress on gender equality within her lifetime.