These words all denote regions, localities or particular portions of space. Site is almost always restricted to an area of ground, small or large. It may be one that has been set aside for a particular use of activity: a building site ; a factory site ; a recreation site . A site may be a circumscribed locale where some event has occurred: the site of Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay; the site of the beheading of Anne Boleyn.

A location is usually a site considered in relation to its surroundings or noteworthy for some specific feature.

• The location of the house is near the highway; The prison guards could not discover the location of the escape tunnel; A post office should be built in a central location .

Place is the most general term and may be substituted in an indefinite sense for all the others. Place may mean a small, circumscribed area: to take one’s place in line; hanging one’s coat in the proper place ; to find a parking place . Buildings, dwellings, cities, towns or larger localities are all loosely called places .

• The bank is his place of business; We are furnishing our place with antiques; He comes from a small place near Dunedin; She sent postcards from many faraway places .

Setting and scene are both places or surroundings in which events (whether real or imaginary) occur or have occurred, and in this sense they may be used interchangeably. However, setting , rather than scene, is often limited in meaning to the place in which the incidents of a play or narrative are laid.

• The setting of Macbeth is Scotland; India is the scene of many of Kipling’s short stories.

Scene is more likely to be used of places in which actual events have occurred, but it suggests a less definite area than does site .

• The meadow at Runnymede was the scene of the signing of the Magna Carta; A dark lane was the scene of the murder.

A scene may also be a wide or even panoramic landscape or view.

• The wild mountain scene lay spread before our hotel.

In a spatial sense, setting suggests a scenic environment or one with special characteristics: a cabin in a woodland setting .

A spot is a specific place , either indoors or outdoors, of limited extent: a beautiful spot in which to have a picnic; finding a spot to plant the new shrub.

In the sense treated here, a point is a particular place without reference to the size or shape of the space occupied. It suggests a fixed location from which position and distance may be reckoned, as when one says that he sails from point to point during a cruise. Otherwise, point is simply a place of definite, though unstated, size: to visit points of interest in London.