That's interesting, as in the UK I've always heard the term Great War for the First World War. Sometime the Second was known as The Last War, which always confused me as a child as I knew there had been wars since.

It's a shame that war memorials site doesn't have a copy of the inscription on the memorials - it would be interesting to do a frequency analysis of the terms used.

I guess there have always been "Great Wars" in history - I remember reading that the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 was called that for generations after (probably in Michael Wood's superb book In Search of England: Journeys Into the English Past). Now we don't even know where Brunanburh took place!

World War II was the last war of that scale, though. May that always continue to be true.

Thats weird. In Australia at least, "The Great War" is how WW1 was described. In that the war was so great (in its terribleness) that it would be the last war of its type.

As the line in the previous series of DR who said "what do you mean "first" "