A general English word with a wide job
Place is one of the most general location words in English. It can mean a spot on a map, a seat at a table, a rank in a contest, a job, a home, or a named street. That range is unusually broad. French splits much of the same work among several nouns, while English has let this one form absorb them.
The origin of the word place is not a native Germanic line. English already had sturdy terms for location, notably stow and stead. Place came in from the south, first as a word for an open stretch of ground, and then kept spreading until those older words were pushed to the margins of everyday speech.
Two arrivals, not one
The history is slightly messy because the form shows up twice.
In Old English, especially in Northumbrian gospel translations, scribes used plaece and plaetse for an open space in a city. Those forms were taken from Latin platea, the word that sat in the Latin Bible for a street or public square. English had already met the noun before the Norman period, at least in religious writing. The Oxford English Dictionary therefore dates the earliest known use to the Old English period, before 1150.
The everyday word we use now is usually treated as a later intake. Around 1200, Middle English place is recorded in the sense of space, room, or area. It came from Old French place, an open space or spot, and from Medieval Latin placea. Merriam-Webster dates the familiar Middle English noun to the thirteenth century, which matches that French-route chronology.
Sources do not tell quite the same story about how those two layers relate. Some etymologies treat the modern word as a reborrowing that overwrote the older biblical loan. Others describe more than one source: partly the Latin line already present in Old English, partly the French form that arrived with later contact. American Heritage and Wiktionary speak of a conflation of Old English plæce and Old French place. The disagreement is real. What is not in doubt is that both streams go back to the same Latin noun.
From a broad street to a spot on the map
Latin platea meant a courtyard, an open space, a broad way or avenue. Rome had taken it from Greek, where plateia hodos was a broad road. Plateia is the feminine of platys, meaning broad or flat. That adjective belongs to a reconstructed Indo-European root often given as plat- or pleth2-, with the sense of spreading out or being flat. The same family shows up in English plate and plateau, and, through a Germanic branch of the same idea, in flat.
Nothing in the English noun is a native prefix plus a native root. It is a borrowed stem that English later turned into both a noun and a verb. The verb, to put something in a position, is recorded from the fifteenth century and follows the noun. A related sense, to set several things in order, appears in the sixteenth.
Because the Latin word travelled widely, English place is a doublet of Italian piazza and Spanish plaza. Catalan plassa belongs to the same set. Dutch plaats, German Platz, Danish plads, and Norwegian plass are relatives by the Latin or French route. Those southern and continental cousins still lean toward the older picture of a public square. English let the meaning thin out until almost any location could be a place.
A smaller group of nearby words is worth keeping separate. Dialect English pleck, for a plot of ground, and Dutch plek sit closer to a patch or spot than to a civic square. They are often compared with place, but they are not simply the same loan in another spelling.
How the senses piled up
The earliest Middle English uses stay close to space and extent: room enough, an area, not yet a pin on a map. By the mid-thirteenth century the noun can name a definite site. Early in the fourteenth it takes on rank: the position a person occupies by custom, precedence, or social standing. Late in the same century it can mean a town or country, and also a portion of a surface.
Other senses grew from the same core rather than from a new root. Mid-fourteenth-century sources use it for a mansion and its grounds. By the late fifteenth it can mean a building set aside for a purpose, as in a house of worship. A situation or post of employment is in use by the 1550s. A cluster of houses in a town appears later in that century. Only around 1690 does English regularly use the word for a broad urban way or square of the French type, the sense still visible in street names built on the same pattern as Park Place.
That last civic sense is, historically, the conservative one. Italian and Spanish kept it at the centre of the word. English kept it as a side meaning and spent centuries stretching the noun toward abstract position: first in a social scale, then in a job, then in a sequence of numbers or arguments. Phrases that order a discussion, such as in the first place, rest on that ranking sense, not on a picture of paving stones.
Native stow survived in place-names and in a few compounds. Stead remains in homestead, instead, and in the idea of standing in someone’s stead. Place took over the unmarked job of saying where something is.
What the cognates still show
If you want a reminder of the older picture, look at plaza and piazza. They keep the wide, public opening that Greek platys named. English kept the same word and then asked it to do almost everything else a location can do: a rank, a job, a home, a blank in a series. The useful dating is double. The form was in English before 1150 in biblical Latin dress, then came back through French around 1200, and the general modern sense is that later, broader life.