Before & After 16: Brought to You by the Letter 'S' (meta)

Yeah, in a sense, there could be a way to call parts of some varieties of dovetail joints mortises, in that you're cutting out a portion of the wood in order to accept a complementary chunk from the joining part.

But I think that basically all traditional woodworkers- who are notorious for arguing endlessly about completely inane things, like whether it's better to cut pins first or tails first, or whether bevel up are superior to bevel down planes- would be united in looking at you like you have 3 eyes if you tried to tell them that a dovetail joint has a tenon :-)

Cutting a dovetail joint — by hand with a back saw and a wood chisel — is a 3D puzzle construction. so a bit of overlap between those two populations would not be surprising.