Origins
The English word 'west' is fundamentally a word about endings — the end of day, the fading of light. It comes from Old English 'west,' from Proto-Germanic *westrą, which most etymologists connect to a PIE root *wes- meaning 'evening' or 'night.' An alternative but related reconstruction links it to PIE *wek(ʷ)speros (evening), which also produced some of the most evocative words in classical languages.
The cross-family cognates are striking. Latin 'vesper' means 'evening' and became the basis of 'vespers,' the Christian evening prayer service. Greek 'hésperos' means 'evening' and was the name for the Evening Star (the planet Venus when visible after sunset). The Hesperides, the mythological nymphs who guarded golden apples at the western edge of the world, were literally 'the daughters of evening' — placed where the sun goes to die each night. Lithuanian 'vãkaras' (evening) continues the same root in the Baltic branch.
The semantic pattern — a direction named after the time of day it evokes — mirrors 'east' perfectly. East is 'the dawn direction'; west is 'the evening direction.' These two words form a complementary pair reaching back to the earliest Indo-European attempts to name the compass points by associating them with the sun's daily journey.
Latin Roots
Within Germanic, the cognates are uniform: German 'West,' Dutch 'west,' Old Norse 'vestr,' Old Frisian 'west,' and Gothic (unattested but reconstructed). As with the other cardinal directions, the word was borrowed into Romance languages — French 'ouest,' Italian 'ovest,' Spanish 'oeste' — replacing the native Latin term 'occidēns' (setting, falling, from the setting sun), which survives in the learned English borrowing 'Occident' and its adjective 'occidental.'
The place-name heritage of 'west' is extensive in English. Wessex was the kingdom of the 'west Saxons,' the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom under Alfred the Great. Westminster means 'western monastery,' so called because it lay to the west of the City of London. Westphalia, a region of Germany, means 'western plain-dwellers.' The American 'West' — and later the 'Wild West' — extended the word's geographic scope to an entire continental frontier.
The metaphorical associations of 'west' have been remarkably consistent across cultures. Because the sun sets in the west, it has long symbolized death, endings, and the afterlife. In ancient Egyptian religion, the dead were buried on the west bank of the Nile, and the realm of the dead was located in the west. The Celtic Otherworld was often placed in the western sea. In Tolkien's mythology, the Undying Lands lie to the uttermost West, and to 'go into the West' is a euphemism for death among the Elves — a literary invention built on millennia of genuine cultural association.
Old English Period
The phonological history of 'west' is unusually stable. The Old English form 'west' is identical in spelling to the Modern English form, and the pronunciation has changed very little — the short /e/ vowel was not significantly affected by the Great Vowel Shift, and the consonant cluster /st/ remained intact. This stability is partly because the word's vowel was short and in a closed syllable, two factors that tend to resist sound change.
In modern geopolitical usage, 'the West' has taken on meanings far beyond geography, referring to a political and cultural bloc centered on Europe and North America. This usage dates primarily from the Cold War division between the Western and Eastern blocs, though its roots extend further back to the longstanding European habit of contrasting 'the West' (Christendom, later secular liberal democracy) with 'the East' (first the Islamic world, later the Communist bloc). The directional word, born from a Proto-Indo-European observation about sunset, now carries the weight of civilizational identity.