A world war is "a war engaged in by all or most of the principal nations of the world".

The term is
usually reserved for two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th
century: World WarI and World WarII . However, a variety of global conflicts have been subjectively
deemed "world wars", such as the Cold War and the War on Terror.

Etymology

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, 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", justifying this description by a line in
an Old Norse epic poem, "Völuspá: folcvig fyrst I heimi" German writer August Wilhelm Otto
Niemann had used the term "world war" in the title of his anti-British novel, Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche
Träume 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", citing a wire service
report in The Indianapolis Star on 20 September 1914. In English, the term "First World War" had
been used by Charles à Court Repington, as a title for his memoirs ; he had noted his discussion on
the matter with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918.

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 WarII" was first used speculatively to describe the
upcoming war. The first use for the actual war came in its issue of September 11, 1939. 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."

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, in Italian: guerra mondiale, in Spanish
and Portuguese: guerra mundial, in Danish and Norwegian: verdenskrig, in Russian: мировая война,
and in Finnish: maailmansota.

First World War

World War I occurred from 1914 to 1918. In terms of human technological history, the scale of
World WarI was enabled by the technological advances of the second industrial revolution and the
resulting globalization that allowed global power projection and mass production of military
hardware. It had been recognized that the complex system of opposing military alliances was likely,
if war broke out, to lead to a worldwide conflict. That caused a very minute conflict between two
countries to have the potential to set off a domino effect of alliances, triggering a world war. The fact
that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that such a war would be
worldwide, as the colonies' resources would be a crucial strategic factor. The same strategic
considerations also ensured that the combatants would strike at each other's colonies, thus
spreading the wars far more widely than those of pre-Columbian times.
War crimes were perpetrated in World War I. Chemical weapons were used in the war despite the
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 having outlawed the use of such weapons in warfare. The
Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian genocide, the murder of more than 1,000,000
Armenians during the First World War, as well as the other late Ottoman genocides.

Second World War

The Second World War occurred from 1939 to 1945 and is the only conflict in which nuclear
weapons have been used; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Japanese Empire, were devastated by
atomic bombs dropped by the United States. Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, was responsible for
genocides, most notably the Holocaust, the killing of about 6,000,000 Jews and 11,000,000 others
persecuted by the Nazis, including Romani people and homosexuals. The United States, the Soviet
Union, and Canada deported and interned minority groups within their own borders and, largely
because of the conflict, many ethnic Germans were later expelled from Eastern Europe. Japan was
responsible for attacking neutral nations without a declaration of war, such as the attack on Pearl
Harbor. It is also known for its brutal treatment and killing of Allied prisoners of war and the
inhabitants of Asia. It also used Asians as forced laborers and was responsible for the Nanking
massacre in which 250,000 civilians were brutally murdered by Japanese troops. Noncombatants
suffered at least as badly as or worse than combatants, and the distinction between combatants and
noncombatants was often blurred by the belligerents of total war in both conflicts.

The outcome of the war had a profound effect on the course of world history. The old European
empires collapsed or were dismantled as a direct result of the wars' crushing costs and, in some
cases, their fall was caused by the defeat of imperial powers. The United States became firmly
established as the dominant global superpower, along with its ideological foe, the Soviet Union, in
close competition. The two superpowers exerted political influence over most of the world's nation-
states for decades after the end of the Second World War. The modern international security,
economic, and diplomatic system was created in the aftermath of the wars.