in 1914 was written when the word truck
did not necessarily connote a motor truck or the word car
a motor car. The same things today would most likely be respectively called hand trucks
and railroad cars'', terms that existed in 1914 but were not yet required for clarity. The global war from 1914 to 1918 was referred to at the time as the
Great War. However, after the subsequent global war erupted in 1939, the phrase
Great War was gradually deprecated. The first came to be known as
World War I and the second as
World War II. The first bicycles with two wheels of equal size were called "
safety bicycles" because they were easier to handle than the then-dominant style that had one large wheel and one small wheel, which then became known as an "ordinary" bicycle. Since the end of the 19th century, most bicycles have been expected to have two equal-sized wheels, and the other type has been renamed "
penny-farthing" or "high-wheeler" bicycle. The
Atari Video Computer System platform was rebranded the "Atari 2600" (after its product code, CX-2600) in 1982 following the launch of its successor, the
Atari 5200, and all hardware and software related to the platform were released under this new branding from that point on. Prior to that time, Atari often used the initialism "VCS" in official literature and other media, but colloquially the Video Computer System was often simply called "the Atari." The television series
Star Trek became known as
Star Trek: The Original Series to distinguish it from its
franchise. The first film in the
Star Wars franchise released in 1977 was simply titled
Star Wars. It was given the subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope" for its 1981 theatrical re-release, shortly after the release of its sequel
The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Initially, this subtitle was limited to the opening text crawl, as all three films in the
original Star Wars trilogy (
Star Wars,
The Empire Strikes Back, and
Return of the Jedi) were still sold under their original theatrical titles on home media formats (such as VHS and Laserdisc). It was not until their 2004 DVD releases that the titles of the individual three films were changed to match the pattern of the
Star Wars prequel trilogy (e.g.
Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope). Often, when films or video games gain sequels that start a series, the first of them is often informally referred to with a "1" or "I" after the title, even if they do not canonically receive such a designation, such as with
Street Fighter in relation to
Street Fighter II. In the 1990s, when the Internet became widely popular and
email accounts' instant delivery common, mail carried by the
postal service came to be called "
snail mail" for its slower delivery compared to email. Advances in technology and science are often responsible for the coinage of retronyms. For example, the term
acoustic guitar was coined with the advent of the
electric guitar,
push bike was created to distinguish from the
motorized bicycle, and
feature phone was coined to distinguish from the
smartphone. Likewise,
visible light refers to
electromagnetic radiation on the narrow
visible spectrum, and
water ice was coined to distinguish the solid state of
water (including exotic forms) from the solid state of other
volatiles such as carbon dioxide and argon. == See also ==