Importantly it’s a vector space with a metric. Not just an array of vectors. The original Word2Vec paper had the jaw dropping “king - man + woman -> queen” whic

Importantly it’s a vector space with a metric. Not just an array of vectors. The original Word2Vec paper had the jaw dropping “king - man + woman -> queen” which needs the ability to do addition/subtraction on vectors. Also words “close” in meaning result in vectors “close” in some sense e.g. it needs a formal measure of distance (eg cosine similarity) which you hint at.