The adjective world-class became current as a result of its original use to describe athletes capable of performing at an international level of competition, as in A 10-second time in the 100-meter dash would put him in the first rank of world-class sprinters. In recent years it has been extended to mean “of an international standard of excellence” and has been applied to a wide variety of categories. The Usage Panel generally accepts the word when it is used of things that naturally admit such comparison. Sixty-five percent accept the description world-class restaurant, and 53 percent accept world-class sports car. But the expression is not generally accepted as a vague way of emphasizing magnitude or degree. Only 7 percent accepted the sentence Johann Sebastian Bach’s 300th birthday will rank as a world-class anniversary, and only 4 percent accepted a newspaper’s description of AIDS as a world-class tragedy.
