Old world
- "Old World" redirects here. For the lore usage, see Eastern Kingdoms.
"Old world" is a term originally used in the World of Warcraft community to denote the parts of the in-game Azeroth that had existed since vanilla WoW, before the addition of any expansions. As commonly understood, the old world did not include the Azuremyst Isles and Quel'Thalas (which were added to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, respectively, in The Burning Crusade), nor Northrend, or islands like Kul Tiras and Zandalar even though they are all located on the current map of Azeroth.
This term was also used internally by the developers in 2010, as seen by the filename oldworld.mpq in patch 4.0.1 and patch 4.0.3, which contains the classic versions of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms — as opposed to world.mpq, containing the versions introduced with the world update in patch 4.0.3a.
Now that Cataclysm and its world revamp have now been in the game longer than the previous "old world", it stands to say that the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor as they stand today can still be considered the "old world" despite them already receiving one revamp.