place [OE] If you have been to Italy or Spain you have probably visited the piazza or plaza of a town. These words have the same origin as English place and French place ‘(public) square’, namely Latin platea ‘open space’, from Greek plateia hodos ‘broad way’. From the early Middle Ages, when it was adopted from French, place superseded Old English stow (found in place names such as Stow on the Wold and Padstow) and *stead, as in Wanstead. The sense ‘a space that can be occupied’ developed in Middle English from this. The orderly person’s mantra a place for everything and everything in its place goes back to the 17th century, but the modern formulation first appears in the 1840s in Captain Frederick Marryat’s nautical yarn Masterman Ready: ‘In a well-conducted man-of-war…every thing is in its place, and there is a place for every thing.’ In 1897 the German Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow, made a speech in the Reichstag in which he declared, ‘we desire to throw no one into the shade [in East Asia], but we also demand our place in the sun’. As a result the expression a place in the sun, ‘a position of favour or advantage’, has been associated with German nationalism. However, it is recorded much earlier, and is traceable back to the writings of the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.