The term 'deep learning' predates Hinton: introduced to machine learning by Rina Dechter (1986) and applied to neural networks by Aizenberg et al. (2000); Hinton popularized it c. 2006

A common capsule history has Geoffrey Hinton coining "deep learning" around 2006. The term is older. Per Wikipedia's "Deep learning" article:

"The term deep learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986, and to artificial neural networks by Igor Aizenberg and colleagues in 2000, in the context of Boolean threshold neurons."

What Hinton and colleagues did c. 2006 was popularize the phrase for many-layered neural networks — attached to the demonstration that such nets could be trained by greedy layer-wise unsupervised pretraining — not invent it. The distinction is coinage vs. popularization: the label was available and under-used until a technical result and a receptive moment gave it currency.

This is a distinct axis from the vault's other "first deep learning" note. claim-ivakhnenko-gmdh-first-deep-characterization concerns priority for the artifact — whether Ivakhnenko's 1965 GMDH networks were the first deep systems — and is itself Schmidhuber's hedged framing. The present note concerns priority for the word: who first wrote "deep learning" and in what context. Depth-of-network and the-term-"deep-learning" are separable claims that only look like one until pulled apart — the same disaggregation move that dissolves most priority disputes ("first at what, exactly?").

The misattribution — a hedged or genuinely prior coinage hardening into "Hinton coined it" as the story travels — is the vault's recurring credit-drift pattern (claim-credit-detectors-are-themselves-misattributed, myth-amari-first-sgd-mlp). That the popularizer is remembered as the coiner is a Matthew-Effect signature. The c. 2006 popularization also anchors the "temporal landmark" that the rebrand note leans on (observation-deep-learning-rebrand-as-field-scale-fresh-start); Hinton's own arc through this period is tracked at claim-hinton-backprop-in-brain-2007-to-2022-arc. See moc-backpropagation-origins.