A world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major

powers.[1] Conventionally, the term is reserved for the two major international conflicts that
occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World War I (1914–1918) and World
War II (1939–1945), although some historians have also described other global conflicts as world
wars, such as the Nine Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War,
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.

Etymology
Etymology[edit]
The Oxford English Dictionary cited the first known usage in the English language to
a Scottish newspaper, The People's Journal, in 1848: "A war among the great powers is now
necessarily a world-war." The term "world war" is used by Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich
Engels,[2] in a series of articles published around 1850 called The Class Struggles in
France. Rasmus B. Anderson in 1889 described an episode in Teutonic mythology as a "world
war" (Swedish: världskrig), justifying this description by a line in an Old Norse epic poem,
"Völuspá: folcvig fyrst I heimi" ("The first great war in the world").[3] German writer August Wilhelm
Otto Niemann used the term "world war" in the title of his anti-British novel, Der Weltkrieg:
Deutsche Träume (The World War: German Dreams) in 1904, published in English as The
Coming Conquest of England.
The term "first world war" was first used in September 1914 by German biologist and
philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that "there is no doubt that the course and character of
the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word",[4] citing
a wire service report in the Indianapolis Star on 20 September 1914. In English, the term "First
World War" had been used by Lt-Col. Charles à Court Repington, as a title for his memoirs
(published in 1920); he had noted his discussion on the matter with a Major Johnstone
of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918.[5][6]
The term "World War I" was coined by Time magazine on page 28b of its June 12, 1939 issue. In
the same article, on page 32, the term "World War II" was first used speculatively to describe the
upcoming war. The first use for the actual war came in its issue of September 11, 1939.[7] One
week earlier, on September 4, the day after France and the United Kingdom declared war on
Germany, the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad used the term on its front page, saying "The
Second World War broke out yesterday at 11 a.m."[8]
Speculative fiction authors had been noting the concept of a Second World War in 1919 and
1920, when Milo Hastings wrote his dystopian novel, City of Endless Night.
Other languages have also adopted the "world war" terminology; for example, in French, "world
war" is translated as guerre mondiale; in German, Weltkrieg (which, prior to the war, had been
used in the more abstract meaning of a global conflict); in Italian, guerra mondiale;
in Spanish and Portuguese, guerra mundial; in Danish and Norwegian, verdenskrig;
in Russian, мировая война (mirovaya voyna); and in Finnish, maailmansota.