My hunch which is that the term "dimension" is an example of overloading a word which originally simply meant the three coordinates required to describe a point

My hunch which is that the term "dimension" is an example of overloading a word which originally simply meant the three coordinates required to describe a point in traditional Euclidian space. With the introduction of the fourth 'dimension' (time) the floodgates broke open and with mathematics in the lead any attribute can now be said to be a dimension. For people still holding on to (and valuing) the original meaning it becomes confusing. Case in point is the star schema of traditional data warehouses: there is no end to the number of 'dimensions' that a fact may have. But they are really just attributes. Same could be said of dimensions in mathematic; they simply denote attributes, albeit in somewhat 'spatial-like' domains.