Why Is the Term Separable Used in Topology?

[hypermonkey2]

Origin of the term "seperable"

I was just curious as to why out of all properties of metric spaces (ie compactness, closure, etc), i don't know how the term seperable makes sense intuitively... is there an origin to this term?
Just curious.
cheers

 

[morphism]

This is one of the mysteries of topology!