Orient [LME] Since the Middle Ages the countries of the East have been referred to as the Orient—the first recorded use of the term appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The name goes back to Latin oriri ‘to rise’, also the source of original [LME] and refers to the rising of the sun. The opposite is Occident, a name for the countries of the West which comes from Latin occidere ‘to go down, set’, and refers to the setting of the sun. The verb to orient originally meant to place someone or something facing east, and disorient [M17th] was originally ‘to turn from the east’.