We’ve had a number of threads about the first use of the phrase ‘World War II’ but fewer, I think, on the origin of the term ‘World War I’.
I was wasting time playing on Google Ngram and came up with this very interesting graph. As those who click on the link will see, it shows that the phrase “world war I” was actually being used to a significant extent during that war itself and, in fact, seems to have started even before the war did (there’s even a blip seen in the 1860’s!). These simple Ngram results would seem to cast some doubt on the veracity of the contents of those sections of the Wikipedia articles on both ‘World War’ and on ‘World War I’ with respect to the name ‘World War I’.
In any case, my question is whether anyone knows the context of those very early uses of ‘World War I’, i.e. the ones from 1912 and 1913, and even from 1914 to 1918 (by moving your cursor over and along the curves, you can reveal the annual usage figures).
The Wiki article on the phrase “world war” (with no numerical suffix) mentions 1909 as the date of the English language debut for “world war” (with no numerical suffix). On the other hand, the article on WWI states that the phrase ‘world war I’ (or its equivalent) did not appear until September 1914, an assertion that would seem to be at odds with the Ngram results showing its use as early as 1912.
So, again, my question is whether anyone can elaborate on the pre-WWI use of the term ‘world war I’. Does anyone know the circumstances of its use? Was it in some author’s hypothetical, as in “We will soon have a world war, perhaps the first of several. There may be a World War I, a World War II, and so forth. We must act now in order to ensure we never speak even of a first world war.”
I haven’t looked into your question specifically, but from past experience, I can tell you that Google’s ngrams are based on what Google thinks is the date of publication. They seem to go by their very imperfect optical character recognition which they don’t appear to verify by human eyes. I used to occasionally alert them to errors along those lines but I never noticed that they made corrections, so I gave that up.
I can imagine a few contexts that might confuse Google a bit:
Given the current World War I don’t think it would be wise to have another baby. This is, indeed, a World War[sup]1[/sup], and many men will perish in it.
Indeed! Two very astute comments that may explain a lot. Thank you.
ETA: posted before I saw Mk VII’s reply and to whose questions I will answer, ‘yes’ for “First World War” and ‘no’ to ‘The Great War’. But please note that even the generic phrase “world war” was not recorded until 1909 (so likely wasn’t used to refer to the Napoleonic Wars).
British Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Charles à Court Repington wrote in his diary on 10th September 1918 that he met with Major Johnstone of Harvard University to discuss what historians should call the war. Repington said it was then referred to as The War, “To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.” Between the wars most people did refer to the war as the Great War, even though that had originally referred to the Napoleonic War. In the US, it was ‘The World War’.
The earlier uses are probably part of the mania for books, usually novels in what today we would call alternate history or alternate futures, depicting a coming war between Germany, France, the UK, Russia, and probably a few others, including the U.S. though almost all had a Eurocentric bias. Some of them were serious warnings, some were fantasies, some were racist nonsense (using racist as anti-German or anti-Russia or whatever). There are so many that I know of a whole book devoted to them, whose name I just can’t think of or find the proper search terms for.
Weirdly, I don’t think it is the ones I do find in a search, The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and The Great War with Germany, 1890-1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come, both by the SF scholar Ignatius Frederick Clarke, who also did Voices prophesying war: future wars, 1763-3749. However, he does mention Der Weltkreig - Deutsche Traume (World War - German Dreams) written by August Niemann and published in 1904. Germany wins, as you might imagine.
I’m skeptical that the term “World War I” was in broad use before the occurrence of a second world war. What we need is someone with an OED to see what it says is the first appearance of the phrase. Of course that would only give an indication of when it was coined, not when it entered into common usage.
When I was growing up my parents had a massive two volume dictionary from the 1930s. Besides the really interesting maps, the dictionary used “Great War” in its history section.
However, maybe the war was a member of the First Wars Club.
Don’t think so. Seems to be asking about why the phrase “World War I” shows up in Google ngram before there was a “World War II.” The first two responses cover that.
The NY Times wrote on 18 September 1939 “Exports of arms, munitions and related materials in World War I amounted…to only 25% of total exports to the Allies.” (I see Exapno mentioned this)
In both cases, it seems to me that the term is being used as if it’s a known usage (the Times doesn’t have it in quotes).
There’s been any number of threads that discuss when the uses of World War I and World War II came into common use. What KarlGauss asked is a different and much more interesting question about uses from before WWI even occurred to talk about.
I think I have discovered the reason for the unexpected results (which were beginning to make me think that I might have stumbled across a better subject choice than what was actually employed in the the recently completed ‘Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers’ study).
It turns out that the Ngram “smoothing” function evidently spreads the year of the citations out a bit, with different choices for ‘smoothing’ leading to different assignments for year of publication.
Colonel Repington’s book, The First World War was published in 1919 and this appears to be one of the earliest, if not the first, public use of the phrase.
