Origins
The word 'venue' arrived in English as a legal term and gradually broadened into everyday language, but its etymological meaning is surprisingly simple: it means 'a coming.' The word is the feminine past participle of Old French 'venir' (to come), from Latin 'venire,' from PIE *gʷem- meaning 'to go' or 'to come.'
The PIE root *gʷem- is notable for producing the most basic motion verb in the Germanic languages: 'come.' Through regular sound changes (the labio-velar *gʷ becoming *kw and then /k/ in Germanic), PIE *gʷem- produced Proto-Germanic *kwemaną, which became Old English 'cuman' and modern English 'come.' German 'kommen,' Dutch 'komen,' and Swedish 'komma' are all siblings. This means that 'venue' (from the Latin branch) and 'come' (from the Germanic branch) are ultimately the same word, separated by thousands of years of divergent sound change.
In English, 'venue' first appeared in the 1530s as a legal term. In common law, the 'venue' of a trial was the locality from which the jury was summoned — the place from which the jurors 'came.' This is not a metaphorical usage but a literal one: the venue was defined by the coming of the jury. The legal phrase 'change of venue' (moving a trial to a different jurisdiction) preserves this original technical meaning and remains standard legal terminology today.
Development
The broader meaning — 'the place where an event occurs' — developed gradually through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, 'venue' was commonly used for theaters, concert halls, and meeting places. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has become the default word for any location hosting an organized event: 'the wedding venue,' 'the concert venue,' 'a sporting venue.'
The family of English words derived from Latin 'venire' is extensive and diverse. 'Adventure' comes from Latin 'adventura' (a thing about to happen, literally 'a thing about to come'), from 'advenire' (to come toward). 'Avenue' is from French 'avenue' (a way of approach), from 'avenir' (to come to), from Latin 'advenire.' 'Convene' is from 'convenire' (to come together). 'Convention' is the noun form of the same verb. 'Event' is from 'eventus' (outcome), from 'evenire' (to come out). 'Invent' is from 'invenire' (to come upon, to find). 'Prevent' originally meant 'to come before' (from 'praevenire'), and only later shifted to its modern sense of 'to stop from happening.' 'Revenue' is from French 'revenu' (returned), from 'revenir' (to come back) — money that comes back to the treasury. 'Intervene' is 'to come between.' 'Souvenir' is from French 'souvenir' (to remember), from Latin 'subvenire' (to come up from below, to come to mind).
The Greek reflex of *gʷem- is 'bainein' (to go, to step), which produced 'basis' (a stepping, a base) — the foundation on which something stands is, etymologically, the place where one steps. 'Acrobat' (one who walks on tiptoe, from 'akrobatos') also contains this root.
Latin Roots
The semantic journey of 'venue' — from 'a coming' to 'a place for coming to' to 'a place where things happen' — illustrates a common linguistic pattern called metonymy: the action (coming) transfers its name to the place associated with that action. We see the same pattern in 'station' (from Latin 'stare,' to stand — a place where one stands) and 'residence' (from 'residere,' to sit back — a place where one sits).
In contemporary usage, 'venue' has an almost exclusively spatial meaning, the original sense of motion and arrival thoroughly bleached away. But every time we ask 'What is the venue?' we are, at the deepest etymological level, asking 'Where are we coming to?'