Who Coined ‘World War’? February 16, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
‘World war’ is a magnificent phrase. It alliterates, it promises a vast scale, and it doesn’t get lost in tiresome Latinate polysyllables. But where does the expression come from? The Longer Oxford Dictionary gives its earliest reference in English to 1848 and the People’s Journal.* Actually the phrase seems to have been used earlier in the same year in The Dispatch which ran with the title ‘The New World War’: though confusingly the war in question was US aggression in the western hemisphere. The phrase only, then, really took off in the writings of Karl Marx and Engels from the 1850s onwards. As such ‘world war’ is perhaps the most successful contribution of Marxist vocabulary to the English language.
Beach has sniffed around a bit to see whether any other languages got there before English: something made overlong by the dreadfulness of Google Book’s metadata. Guerra mondiale was used in Italian as early as 1860 (there are some delightful histrionic sentences); in French guerre mondiale seems not to have been used before the Great War, ditto guerra mundial for Spanish. The one language where World War was unquestionably used earlier was German. In fact, there are a number of early nineteenth-century references to Weltkrieg – one applied, perhaps reasonably enough, to the Napoleonic wars. So many references, in fact, that Weltkrieg, this blogger would guess, very possibly goes back into the late 1700s.
Other languages? drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
Is World War, then, actually a German phrase that Marx brought over into English? It does have a Hegelian vibe. If so Beach would enjoy the poetry of the fact that Germany not only started two world wars, but they also gave the English-speaking countries a useful term to describe them.
*This is frequently asserted online. But my copy of the Longer Oxford English Dictionary does not carry it!
And an n-gram chart of the development of the word in English.
28 Feb 2018: Southern Man writes ‘this is all particularly interesting because let’s face it, there had been world wars since at least the 1700s. The seven years war and the Napoleonic war clearly have a global reach. I’d reformulate your question. Why are only the Germans up to understanding this simple fact?’
