In Makie, a figure can have multiple plots. But for some reason each plot is called an “Axis” instead of a “Plot”. I normally think of a 2d plot having two axes – I don’t think of the whole plot being one axis. Is this a legacy of Matplotlib’s naming “an Axes”?
Why not just call it a Plot?
In Makie, a primitive object placed in a Scene is called a plot (Lines, Scatter, Heatmap, etc), , so an Axis can’t be the same thing. To be honest, plotting is full of very loosely defined terms. When you say a figure can have multiple plots you’re subscribing to one view what a “plot” is but that’s not necessarily the only one. It’s similar with Axis, we say there’s an x axis and a y axis, so one Axis has two axes 
An Axis can have multiple plots inside it. You can put one or more line plots, scatter plots, bar plots, etc. inside an Axis object.
If this terminology was inherited from matplotlib, then it came from Matlab before that again. Not sure about the origin.