global

global

has developed its meaning from the original simple meaning ‘spherical, round’ to ‘all-inclusive’ in abstract senses (19c) and, more recently, ‘world-wide, involving the whole world’, as in global warfare and the global village (coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1960 to denote the effective shrinking of the world by virtue of advanced communications), and especially in global warming, a term that became established in the 1980s to refer to the increase in the temperature of the earth's atmosphere caused by carbon emissions and other factors. Globalism and globalization, terms that date from about 1960, refer to the global, i.e. international, scale on which commerce, politics, and other aspects of human activity have tended to operate in recent years. In computer technology from the 1960s onwards, global means ‘operating on the whole of a file or program’, so that a global change made to an item is one that affects every occurrence of that item.