In official mainland Chinese Mandarin, the Korean War is "The War to Resist America and Aid Korea" (抗美援朝战争). The name deliberately echoes the Mandarin name of the Second Sino-Japanese War, "The War to Resist Japan", implying that the US invaded Korea in the same way that Japan invaded China.

As an example, see the title of this article in a Chinese non-peer-reviewed journal: http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-YCLT200703007.htm

In Vietnam the Vietnam War is "Kháng chiến chống Mỹ" (Resistance War against America). When I was there local people I spoke to called it "the American war" when speaking to me in English. Of course calling it "the Vietnam war" would be loopy to them, 'cos they have had a whole bunch of wars.

As Americans, we use the names World War 2, The Korean War, the Gulf war, etc. Did different countries use alternate names, such as "The American War" for these same major events?

This is fairly common.

To use an example close to home, for Americans the Mexican War (1846-8) is a one-off, called "the Mexican War," and the U.S. expeditions into Mexico in 1914 and 1916 are called the "Occupation of Veracruz" and the "Villa Expedition," respectively. There's no logical continuity in the terminology, which leads the reader to think that these are discrete, unconnected events.

Not so from the Mexican side. The Mexican War, Occupation of Veracruz, and Villa Expedition are commonly termed the "First American intervention," "Second American intervention," and "Third American intervention," which does two things. First, it treats the American expeditions as part of a larger pattern of meddling in Mexican internal affairs. Second, it integrates those three historical incidents into part of a larger historical pattern by making an implicit comparison to the First and Second French interventions in Mexico. (The First Intervention is known in English as the Pastry War, and the Second Intervention is known in English simply as the French Intervention. The government of Mexico was not particularly strong before 1929.)

For folks answering this question, keep in mind that single-sentence answers aren't acceptable. This isn't /r/GoogleItForMe. /u/SeekTruthFromFacts' answer is about as short as you want to go. It states the different names, explains why they're different, and provides a source in a contemporary publication.

In the Philippines, the Philippine-American War was called just that. But in the United States, various names were used:

• Philippine Insurrection
• the Tagalog Insurgency
• the Philippine Revolution
• the Filipino-American War
• the Philippine War

Reference to the war as a "revolution" or "insurgency" was a minor sticking point in Fil-Am relations because the prevailing narrative in the Philippines is that the Philippine revolutionaries against Spain had already won -- or at least would have won -- without American intervention.

From that perspective, this means that the Philippine government (or rather governments as parallel republics were set up elsewhere, notably Iloilo, Zamboanga, and Negros, where I'm from. Decidedly non-Tagalog.) were already the legitimate ruler of the islands.

In 1999 the U.S. Library of Congress reclassified its references to use the term Philippine-American War.

Here in Canada we learn about the American War of Independence - which Americans call the American Revolution.

My high school history teacher explained that a revolution unseats a government, but there is still a monarch on the throne in England; that the Americans just gained colonial independence. By contrast the French had a revolution. [Take that freedom fries.]

I am curious whether my teacher's definition of revolution is widely accepted.

Not historian, but I just wanted to add that the "Spanish-American war" in called "La Guerra de Cuba" in Spain (Cuba's war) or also on a more dramatic vein "El Desastre del 98" (The 98 Disaster).

Many of the wars have been disccussed, but are there many alternative names to the two world wars?