Dorm

How to spell dorm

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dorm

What does dorm mean?

1. nounA residence hall, or a room within one, where students live during their studies.

Dorm in a sentence

• She shared a cramped dorm with three other first-year students.

• The university charges extra for a single dorm near the campus library.

Where does dorm come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a casual clipping of 'dormitory', a word that traces back to the Latin dormitorium, meaning 'a sleeping place'. That noun was built on the verb dormire, which simply meant 'to sleep', and the related dormiens lives on in English words like 'dormant', describing something that lies sleeping or inactive. English took 'dormitory' from Latin in the 1400s to describe a large communal sleeping room, and the snappy short form 'dorm' arose in student slang, becoming especially common in North American college life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because the word is so short and phonetic, its only real spelling point is remembering that it ends in a single 'm', faithfully echoing the 'dorm' inside 'dormitory'.

How the word is built

• dorm (clipped from dormitory)
• (no suffix); ultimately from Latin dormire 'to sleep'