when was the term world war ii first used
World war 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" had been used in 1850 by Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels,[1] in 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".)[2] German writer August Wilhelm Otto Niemann had 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.