Wikipedia traces it back to this [1] 2002 paper, which talks about translated documents having an "embedding space" in each language. I guess you could interpre

Wikipedia traces it back to this [1] 2002 paper, which talks about translated documents having an "embedding space" in each language. I guess you could interpret their paper as both English and French being embedded in some larger space, which would make it a valid use of the mathematical term. From there, people apparently just rolled with it and used the term more broadly, as tends to happen with language. 1: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2002/file/d5e2fbef30a4eb668a203060ec8e5eef-Paper.pdf https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2002/file/d5e2fbef30a4e...