Calling it a false positive is entirely in line with the historical use. Back in the 1980s or earlier it was called a "false drop". Knuth, for example, talks

Calling it a false positive is entirely in line with the historical use. Back in the 1980s or earlier it was called a "false drop". Knuth, for example, talks about it in "The Art of Computer programming", v3, section 6.5, "Retrieval on Secondary Keys", using cookie ingredients. (See https://archive.org/details/fileorganisation0000thar/mode/2up?q=%22false+drop%22 https://archive.org/details/fileorganisation0000thar/mode/2u... for Tharp using the same example.) Bloom filters are a type of superimposed coding.