Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could “mansplain” a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. “It’s been

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"a paper by Richard Chenevix Trench, the dean of Westminster, entitled “On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries”. It was a bombshell: Trench argued that British word banks were so unreliable that the slate needed to be wiped clean."