first world war When did the Great War become the First World War?
I would have naively supposed in 1939, but I was startled to see the following in a conversation, dated 1927 by the context, in a novel published in 1934: My dear Don, you ought to know by this time that we hocked our manhood for a brass check about the time of the First World War . . . that is if we had any . . . I suppose there'd be various opinions about that.