Benjamin W. Lee popularized the term "Higgs boson" in a 1972 ICHEP review talk, eight years after the original theoretical papers

physicshistory-of-sciencehiggs-bosonnamingterminologyCERNB-W-Lee

Per John Ellis's historical account, the common name "Higgs boson" is not traceable to Peter Higgs's own 1964 papers (which do not use the phrase) but to Benjamin W. Lee, who "carries much of the responsibility for calling the Higgs boson the Higgs boson," having repeatedly used the phrase "Higgs scalar fields" in a review talk at the 16th International Conference on High-Energy Physics (Batavia, Illinois, 1972) — eight years after the original 1964 theoretical papers and three years before Ellis's own group began the first systematic phenomenological study of the particle.

This sits inside the same naming/priority seam as the 1964 discovery-credit claim: the mechanism was found by three groups, the massive-scalar prediction belonged to one of them, and the enduring popular name for that particle was coined by a fourth person entirely, a decade later, for reasons of pedagogical convenience rather than priority. Naming and discovery priority are shown here to be two separate historical events with two separate actors — a pattern the vault's broader credit-assignment cluster already tracks in other domains (e.g. "spontaneous order" had no single coiner).