12 июня 1939 года. В одной и той же статье "Таймс" появились 2 новых понятия WWI и WWII.
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.
In English, the term "First World War" had been used by Charles à Court Repington, as a title for his memoirs (published in 1920); he had noted his discussion on the matter with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918.
The term "World War I" was coined by Time magazine in its issue of June 12, 1939. In the same article, the term "World War II" was first used speculatively to describe the upcoming war. The first use for the actual war came in its issue of September 11, 1939. One week earlier, on September 4, the day after France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad used the term on its front page, saying "The Second World War broke out yesterday at 11 a.m."