Comprehensive information and links about The World

The World This article is about the World, meaning the Earth. For uses of the specific phrase "The World", see The World (disambiguation) age; thus, its oldest meaning is "age or life of man". Its primary modern meaning is the planet Earth, especially when capitalized: . In this sense, a world map is a map of the surface of the Earth. World can also refer to human population in general or to a distinct group of people.

can be used in less literal words; for example, two people with very little in common are "living in two different worlds". The "end of the world" usually means "the end of everything I am familiar with."

this world", and the term "worldhood" has been distinguished from "monkhood", the former being the status of merchants, farmers, and others who deal with "worldly" things.The term can also be used in a culturally specific context: commentators increasingly refer, for example, to the "Muslim world" as if it were a distinct entity.In modern Europe, referring to the world usually means Europe to its furthest extent, plus ocassionaly USA and Japan. (example: In Native American mythology, the Fifth World is the coming world that will exist after the current world. were used to divide the nations of Earth into three broad categories. The three terms did not arise simultaneously. After World War II it became common to speak of the capitalist and Communist countries as two major blocs, using such terms as the "free world" as compared to the "communist bloc". The two "worlds" were not numbered. It was eventually pointed out that there were a great many countries that fit into neither category, and in the 1950s this latter group came to be called the Third World. It then began to seem that there ought to be a "First World" and a "Second World". These latter terms were always much less common.

In the context of the Cold War:

refers to nations that were within the Western European and United States' sphere of influence — e.g., the NATO countries of North America and Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some of the former British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. referred to nations within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, principally the Warsaw Pact countries. Besides the Soviet Union proper, most of Eastern Europe was run by satellite governments working closely with Moscow. This term may or may not also refer to Communist countries whose leadership were at odds with Moscow, e.g. China and Yugoslavia. Recently, this term has been used to describe former Third World countries that have experienced too much development to be classified any longer as being a part of the Third World. refers to nations within neither sphere of influence, whom, for part of them, tried to organize themselves into the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. They were mostly developing countries, and many of them are located in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They are often nations that were colonized by another nation in the past. After World War II, the First and Second Worlds struggled to expand their respective spheres of influence to the Third World. The militaries and intelligence services of the United States and the Soviet Union worked both secretly and overtly to influence Third World governments, with mixed success.

There were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remained neutral.

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the term "Second World" largely fell out of use, though the term "Third World" remains popular, mostly as another term for developing countries. The remaining Communist countries either became more isolated from the world economy, as in North Korea and Cuba, or began integrating capitalist concepts such as private enterprise into their societies and forging new trading ties with external capitalist economies, as in Vietnam and China.

In more recent use, the term First World refers to developed nations, while Third World, in contrast, refers to developing, often used to refer to nations that lack any national representation at the UN, but that may enjoy representation at UNPO — indigenous peoples living within or across state boundaries.

"The World" can also be used to refer to the population on the planet