The Etymology of Locate
Locate started as a placing word, not a finding word.βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ When English borrowed it from Latin locatus in the 16th century, it meant 'to establish in a place' β you located a settlement, a boundary, or a claim. The sense of discovering where something already is came later, gradually overtaking the original meaning by the 19th century. This reversal β from putting things somewhere to finding things somewhere β marks one of locate's quieter semantic shifts. The Latin ancestor locus ('place') was extraordinarily productive. It gave English local, location, locale, allocate ('assign to a place'), dislocate ('put out of place'), and locomotive ('moving from place to place'). Through French lieu, it produced lieutenant ('place-holder') and the phrase 'in lieu of'. In mathematics, a locus is a set of points satisfying a given condition β the Latin word used raw. In rhetoric, loci were the 'places' where arguments could be found, and locus communis ('common place') gave English the word commonplace, which shifted from a rhetorical term to an adjective meaning 'ordinary'. American English expanded locate in a way that British English never fully accepted: 'We located in Virginia' meaning 'We settled there'. This transitive-to-intransitive shift flourished on the American frontier, where locating land claims was daily business, and the word naturally extended from the land to the people claiming it.