Yeah, it is. Sprite originally meant a hardware layer, back from the ancient times. Nowadays it also sometimes means rasterized 2D objects.

C64, Amiga, MSX, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, etc. all supported hardware layer sprites back in the eighties.

What's the difference? Size? If a hardware layer could be configured to be 32x32 pixels and offset to any position, wouldn't it become a sprite?