east: the direction of the sunrise, and the eastern side or region it names
This is the everyday Hebrew word for east. It is built from the verb for the sun coming up, so at root it means "the place where the sun rises." From that literal picture it became the plain compass term: the eastern side of a place, the eastern boundary of a territory, the gate or quarter that faces the dawn.
Most of the time the word is doing ordinary geographical work. It marks the east side of the tabernacle court, the eastern edge of the land, the lands east of the Jordan, or a gate that opens toward sunrise (the so-called East Gate is simply the gate facing that way). In these texts "east" is a flat direction with no special weight.
But because the word literally names the sunrise, it also keeps a vivid sense of "the rising of the sun" itself. Pairing east with west then becomes a way of saying "everywhere, the whole world over," from one end of the sky to the other. The two uses are the same word seen from two angles: the bare direction, and the sunrise that gives the direction its name.