hostels

Noun

hostel (plural hostels)

1. An overnight lodging place for travelers, with dormitory accommodation and shared facilities, especially a youth hostel.
   • a rundown hostel
2. A temporary refuge for the homeless providing a bed and sometimes food.
3. (obsolete) A small, unendowed college in Oxford or Cambridge.
   • There are also in Oxford certeine hostels or hals, which may rightwell be called by the names of colleges , if it were not that there is more libertie in them , than is to be seen in the other1577, Raphaell Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande […], volume I, London: […] [Henry Bynneman] for Iohn Harrison, →OCLC
4. (obsolete) A public hotel.
   • Immediately at hand was a small, mean public-house - one of those dingy establishments that seem to express, by their morbid and retiring appearance, a certain anxiety to escape the eye of the police - and into the parlour of this hostel Quin promptly led the way.1913, Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall Co., published 1932, page 135
5. (South Africa, South-Asia) A university or school dormitory, a place of accommodation for students.

See all 7 meanings of hostel