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dormitory

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈdɔː.mɪ.tɹi//
  • United States//ˈdɔɹ.mɪˌtɔɹ.i//
  • Canada//ˈdɔɹ.mɪˌtɔɹ.i//
  • Canada//ˈdɔɹ.mɪ.tɹi//

A room containing a number of beds (and often some other furniture and/or utilities) for sleeping, often applied to student and backpacker accommodation of this kind.

noun

  1. 1

    A room containing a number of beds (and often some other furniture and/or utilities) for sleeping, often applied to student and backpacker accommodation of this kind.

    She will be much more likely to meet his wishes after a residence at the castle, than an imprisonment on short commons in her dormitory in Welbeck Street; for in one case she only learnt how much she could endure, in the other she will find how much she can enjoy.

    The foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova was responding to a report last week about an item in the 2024 US air force budget for building a dormitory at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk for personnel on a “potential surety mission” – military jargon for nuclear safety and security.

  2. 2

    A building or part of a building which houses students, soldiers, monks etc. who sleep there and use communal further facilities.

  3. 3

    A dormitory town.

Etymology

From Middle English dormitory, dormytory, dormytorye, borrowed from Latin dormītōrium (“a sleeping-room”), from dormiō (“to sleep”). Doublet of dormitorium and dorter.

Forms

plural
dormitories
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).