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Origin and history of global

global(adj.)

1670s, "spherical," from globe + -al (1). Meaning "worldwide, universal, pertaining to the whole globe of the earth" is from 1892, from a sense development in French. Global village first attested 1960, popularized, if not coined, by Canadian educator Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

Postliterate man's electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens. Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the global village. [Carpenter & McLuhan, "Explorations in Communication," 1960]

Entries linking to global

late 14c., "a large mass;" mid-15c., "spherical solid body, a sphere," from Old French globe (14c.) and directly from Latin globus "round mass, sphere, ball" (also, of men, "a throng, crowd, body, mass"), which is related to gleba "clod, lump of soil" (see glebe) and perhaps also to glomus "a ball, ball of yarn."

Sense of "the planet earth," also "map of the earth or sky drawn on the surface of an artificial sphere" are attested from 1550s. Meaning "globe-shaped glass vessel" is from 1660s. "A globe is often solid, a sphere often hollow. The secondary senses of globe are physical; those of sphere are moral." [Century Dictionary].

used from c. 1946 in a variety of senses, both by those supporting and those opposed to whatever it was: American intervention in foreign conflicts, a global foreign policy; supremacy of global institutions over national ones; a worldwide extension of capitalist market systems; from global + -ism. Related: Globalist.

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