East
East is a direction in geography. It is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points. It is opposite of west and perpendicular to north and south.
East is the direction toward which the Earth rotates about its axis, and therefore the general direction from which the Sun appears to rise. However, in astronomy the east side of the sun is defined opposite with respect to the rotation direction, so it is the direction from which it rotates.
During the Cold War, "The East" was sometimes used to refer to the Warsaw Pact and Communist China, along with other Communist nations.
Throughout history, the East has also been used by Europeans in reference to the Orient and Asian societies.
Etymology
The etymology of east is from a Proto-Indo-European language word for dawn, *hausos. Cf. Latin aurora and Greek eōs. Ēostre, a Germanic goddess of dawn, might have been a personification of both dawn and the cardinal points.
By convention, an ordinary terrestrial map is oriented so the right side is east. This convention dates from the Renaissance. Many medieval maps were oriented with the Orient (the East) east at the top, which is the different source of the verb orient.
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