Why were World War 1 and World War 2 seen as a World Wars, yet the 7 Years War wasn’t seen as one?

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I’ve always wondered this. The 7 Years war was fought on multiple continents and decided the world as we know it, just like both World Wars. I just don’t get why it wasn’t seen as a world war and I came here to ask why.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

At the end of the day, this is really a linguistics question more than anything, and the answer is that people don’t name things based on some logical scientific system. They didn’t make a list of all the wars and run statistics and mathematically classify them based on scale and casualties in order to determine the most objective naming scheme. That’s just not how language works.

People name things largely based on what feels right. That kid in the neighborhood who’s nicknamed “Slim”—did they measure all the neighborhood kids and determine he was objectively the slimmest? Obviously not. “Slim” just felt like the right nickname. Maybe someone else is actually skinnier, but that doesn’t matter, because Slim is Slim now.

WWI happened a century and a half after the Seven-Years war, so nobody was alive who had experienced both, and evidently people didn’t really consider it a second iteration of the Seven-Years War, so they just called it the Great War. You can make arguments that maybe WWI really was just Seven Years Part II, I dunno, you’d have to ask a historian… but that doesn’t matter, because that’s not what the people at the time decided to call it, and it’s not what stuck.

WWII happened only 30 years after WWI, and largely as a direct result of tensions created in the aftermath of WWI. It definitely felt like a sequel to the people of the time, quite a lot of whom were alive for both wars. So the one-and-two naming scheme stuck.

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