World war

A world war is a war involving many or most of the world's most powerful and populous countries. World wars span multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theatres.

The term is applied to the two major international conflicts that occurred during the 20th century:

In terms of human technological history, the scale of these wars was enabled by the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution and resulting globalization that allowed global power projection and mass production of military hardware, but wars on such a scale have not been repeated due to the onset of the Atomic Age and the resulting danger of mutual assured destruction.

Origins of the term "world war"

The term "World War" was coined speculatively in the early 20th century, some years before the First World War broke out, probably as a literal translation of the German word Weltkrieg. German writer August Wilhelm Otto Niemann had used the word in the title of his anti-British novel Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume ("The World War: German Dreams") as early as 1904, published in English as The coming conquest of England. Also, the term was used as early as 1850 by Karl Marx in The Class Struggles in France, as well as his associate Friedrich Engels.Rasmus B. Anderson in 1889 describes 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). The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first known usage in the English language to a Scottish newspaper, the People's Journal in 1848: "A war amongst the great powers is now necessarily a world-war."