]]East is a direction in geography. It is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points, opposite of west and at right angles 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.The etymology of east is from a Proto-Indo-European language word for dawn. Cf. Latin aurora and Greek e?s. Eostre, a Germanic goddess of dawn, might have been a personification of both dawn and the cardina