The ngram viewer suggests that if such a terminology was ever commonly used, it was suspiciously correlated with the Cold War: https://books.google.com/ngrams/g

The ngram viewer suggests that if such a terminology was ever commonly used, it was suspiciously correlated with the Cold War: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=first+world%2Csecond+world%2Cthird+world&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=first+world%2C...