 The term was popularized during the period of the British Empire as a blanket term for lands to the east of British India.In pre-World War I European geopolitics, the "Near East" referred to the relatively nearby lands of the Ottoman Empire, the "Middle East" denoted northwestern South Asia and Central Asia, and the "Far East" meant countries along the western Pacific Ocean and eastern Indian Ocean.Many European languages have analogous terms, such as the French ('), Spanish ('), Portuguese ('), German ('), Italian ('), Polish ('), Norwegian (') and Dutch (').