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, 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 ''.) 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.
when was the term world war ii first used
Scottish newspaper: the People 's Journal in 1848