Dormitory typically refers in the United States to residence halls, which are sleeping quarters or entire buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for large numbers of people, often boarding school, college or university students. The U.K. equivalent for universities is Hall of residence, although "dormitory" is still used for schools.
Many colleges and universities no longer recognize the word "dormitory" and staff are now using the term residence hall (analogous to the United Kingdom "hall of residence") or simply "hall" instead. This is promoted as better describing a living and learning community that is part of the larger academic institution. When the word "dorm" was first adapted for universities and colleges, the atmosphere of the buildings served as places for students to sleep. Often students had a curfew to be in the building for "lights out" and a "dorm mother" was in charge of running the building. This is no longer true as residence halls as of 2007 strive to provide a more inclusive community for residents. Features of life such as cafeterias, academic centers, active and passive programming, resident assistants and hall coordinators have given a new experience to living on campus.
College and university residential rooms vary in size, shape, facilities and number of occupants. Typically, a United States residence hall room holds two students with no toilet. This is usually referred to as a "double". Often, residence halls have communal bathroom facilities. In the United States, residence halls are sometimes segregated by sex, with men living in one group of rooms, and women in another. Some dormitory complexes are single-sex with varying limits on visits by persons of each sex. For example, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has a long history of Parietals, or mixed visiting hours. Most colleges and universities offer coeducational dorms, where either men and women reside on separate floors but in the same building or where both sexes share a floor but with individual rooms being single-sex. In the early 2000s, dorms that allowed people of opposite sexes to share a room became available in some public universities. Some colleges and university coeducational dormitories also feature coeducational bathrooms. Most residence halls are much closer to campus than comparable private housing such as apartment buildings. This convenience is a major factor in the choice of where to live since living physically closer to classrooms is often preferred, particularly for first-year students who may not be permitted to park vehicles on campus. Universities may therefore provide priority to first-year students when allocating this accomodation.
Halls located away from university facilities sometimes have extra amenities such as a recreation room or bar. As with campus located residence halls, these off-campus halls commonly also have Internet facilities, either through a network connection in each student room, a central computer cluster room, or Wi-Fi. Catered halls may charge for food by the meal or through a termly subscription. They may also contain basic kitchen facilities for student use outside catering hours. Most halls contain a laundry room.
In U.K. universities these buildings are usually called "halls of residence" (commonly referred to as "halls"), except at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews, York, Lancaster and Kent where the residential accommodation is incorporated in each college's complex of buildings, and there is no specific term for it (members of the college who live in its own buildings are usually said to be "living in", or "living in college"), although "halls of residence" is still used at times.
The Watterson Towers at Illinois State University are among the tallest residence halls in the world. The 28-story complex, which was built in 1967 holds over 2,200 students and its buildings are 91 meters tall.
Dobie Center, an off-campus, 27-story private dormitory next to The University of Texas at Austin, stands at 112 meters. In addition to being a private residence for students, Dobie also contains a 2 story mall, a movie theatre, restaurants, and specialty stores. The Valkendorfs Kollegium at the University of Copenhagen was founded in 1589. Though not as old as some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, it is among the oldest dormitories in the world.
The Stone Frigate at Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario was constructed in 1820 to store part of the dismantled fleet from the War of 1812. The former warehouse was converted into a dormitory and classrooms when the college was established in 1874. The Stone Frigate, a designated heritage building, was closed for more than 18 months for major renovations to the interior and exterior of the dormitory.
The Capstone House at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina completed in 1967, standing at 18 stories, has the only revolving restaurant on an American college campus located on the 18th floor know as Top of Carolina Dining Room..
Residence Halls typically have housekeeping staff to maintain the cleanliness of common rooms including lobbies and bathrooms. Students are normally required to maintain the cleanliness of their own rooms and private or semi-private bathrooms, where offered.
U.S. military dormitory accommodations are generally intended for two junior enlisted single personnel per room, although in most cases this is slowly being phased out in favor of single occupancy in accordance with newer Department of Defense standards.
All branches of the U.S. military except the Air Force still refer to these dormitory-style accommodations as "barracks". The Air Force, in contrast, refers to all unaccompanied housing, including basic training open-bay barracks housing dozens per room as well as unaccompanied housing for senior ranking personnel, which resemble apartments and are only found in a select number of overseas locations, as "dormitories".
In Japan, many of the larger companies still offer to their newly graduated freshmen a room in a dormitory. A room in such a dormitory often comes with a communal cook (for the men) or rooms with furnished kitchen blocks (for the women). Usually the employees pay a very small amount of money to enable the men (especially) to save money to buy a house when they get married.