Who Coined "Turing Test"?

Who coined the term "Turing Test"? Did Alan Turing call his "imitation game" that? (Apparently not, and there's some popular misconceptions about these terms.)

No. Alan Turing did not call it the “Turing test.”

In his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing called the setup the “imitation game.” He begins the relevant section: “The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game’.”

Turing did sometimes describe the procedure generically as a “test.” In a 1952 BBC discussion, for example, he spoke of “a particular kind of test” to apply to a machine. But he never called it the “Turing test”—that eponymous name was applied later.

As for who actually coined the phrase “Turing test”: there does not seem to be a securely established individual coiner. The historical sources I can find treat it as a name that emerged in the subsequent literature rather than attributing it to a particular person. It was certainly in use by the late 1960s; a 1969 paper, for example, explicitly uses “Turing Test.”

One further wrinkle: Turing's original “imitation game” initially involved an interrogator trying to distinguish a man from a woman. He then asks what happens when a computer takes the man's place. So even equating the modern standardized “Turing test” exactly with Turing's opening game obscures some of what he actually wrote.