Being disoriented didn’t used to mean being confused.

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To orient oneself is to figure out how or where you are in relation to other things. Orienteering involves using a compass to navigate across the landscape. To become disoriented is to become confused; you’ve lost your bearings.

These words orient, orienteering and disoriented don’t appear on the surface to be related to the orient in oriental rug, but in fact they are.

The ancestor word of our word orient is from Latin and meant “to arise” or “to be born”.  According to the OED, in 1375, orient arose into the English language born out of the pen of one Geoffrey Chaucer who used the word more than once with both the meanings of the lands to the east and the east itself.

In his Knight’s Tale he writes

And fiery Phoebus rises up so bright
That all the orient is laughing with the light,
And with his streamers dries, among the greves,
The silver droplets hanging on the leaves.

So the connection is that the sun arises or is born every morning in the east.  Hence the Far East was called the Orient and the compass point east called orient ever since Chaucer’s time in English but even longer in French and Latin.

By the early 1700s church architects would say that their sanctuaries were oriented because they faced east.

By the mid 1800s other things as well as people could be oriented which by this point didn’t always have to mean that they faced toward the east.

In a time when orient meant “east” disoriented meant to “leave the east” or to “turn from the east” but as orient morphed to mean other directions to be disoriented followed along meaning not only that one had lost their direction but extending to mean confused generally.