Sunflower asked me about these two terms, and I couldn't tell her for sure what all four estates are, so I guessed, government, religion, the populace, and the press. Nor could I tell her what a "second world" country is. Help us out!

The three estates of the realm are

1. the clergy;
2. the nobility;
3. the rest.

See Wikipedia. The press is often referred to as the fourth estate.

The second world was, basically, the Warsaw Pact countries under the leadership of the old USSSR. Again, see Wikipedia.

I've always thought in the US that since we don't officially have either nobility or commoners that the three estates were the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and yes, the fourth estate is the press--i.e. I had always heard that the three branches kept each other in line (sometimes) with their "checks and balances" and the press, the fourth estate, was there to keep them all honest by exposing any wrongdoing.

Third world: first is the Old World (Europe), the second is the New World (America) and the third world are those nations left behind, not yet industrialized, impoverished, uneducated, hungry. but one of the dictionaries says the first and second worlds were the capitalist and communist blocs.

Wordmatic

The original metaphor of first, second, and third world, was, as Arnie's link suggests, the NATO countries, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the non-aligned countries.

I remember when the word "Third World" was coined. The news always spoke of the communist countries, and the "West" or democratic countries. The Free World vs the Commiunist world. Everything was discussed in terms of those two forces when someone said, "Hey, there are other people in the world. There are the poor countries, countries that are not in the big power struggles. There are not just the Free World and the Communist World, but there is a Third World of all the other people in poor countries." The term Third World was not then used to refer to the poor in our own country.

quote:

I remember when the word "Third World" was coined.

Missann raises the interesting question of when the word was coined.

OED gives the first cite on Oct. 23, 1963. I found it a bit earlier in The Fresno Bee Republican of April 28, 1963:

There are east and west, and then there's the "third world." The term is well known in Italy, but Nikita Khrushchev confessed it mystified him.

There may well be earlier, but so many hits are extraneous (such as "force the Third World War" or "the second inning of the third World Series game") that it's hard to find any grain of wheat within all the chaff.

Could we have a group of fifth columnists posing as members of the fourth estate in a third world country?

For a second, Asa, we thought some sixth sense would lead you to Seventh Heaven. ... ...

Very early on we had a brief conversation about this here, and here is a more recent thread about the number 7.