Short answers, pulled from the story.
Orient derives from the Latin word oriens, meaning "east" or literally "rising," from the verb orior, meaning "rise." The term referred to the direction where the sun rises, and parallel words for east built on the same solar metaphor exist in Armenian, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Kazakh, and Japanese.
The Diocese of the Orient was formally created during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305. The territory corresponded roughly to the region of Syria and later expanded into the Praetorian prefecture of the Orient, covering most of the Eastern Roman Empire from Thrace eastward.
Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. The Palestinian-American scholar argued that "Orientalism" described a pervasive Western tradition of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the Arab and Muslim worlds, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. The book became both influential and controversial.
In 2016, President Obama signed legislation introduced by New York Congresswoman Grace Meng, H.R. 4238, which replaced the word "Oriental" with "Asian American" in federal law. Washington State had separately prohibited the term in all legislation and government documents.
The adjective "Oriental" in Uruguay's official name refers to the country's geographic location east of the Uruguay River. The usage dates to the 18th century, when the territory was known as the Banda Oriental, and the word carries a deep historical meaning as Uruguay's national demonym.
The term originally referred to Egypt, the Levant, and adjacent areas as far west as Morocco. During the 1800s, India and China displaced the Levant as the primary focus, and as European travelers pushed eastward the term eventually reached the Pacific. By the mid-20th century, Western scholars generally limited "the Orient" to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and eastern Central Asia.