hostel

plural hostels

1. An overnight lodging place for travelers, with dormitory accommodation and shared facilities, especially a youth hostel.

   a rundown hostel

   2 more examples

   The rest, around the hostel fire, / Their drowsy limbs recline; / For pillow, underneath each head, / The quiver and the targe were laid: / Deep slumbering on the hostel floor, / Oppressed with toil and ale, / they snore: […]

   1808 February 22, Walter Scott, “Canto Third. The Hostel, or Inn.”, in Marmion; a Tale of Flodden Field, Edinburgh: […] J[ames] Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Company, […]; London: William Miller, and John Murray, →OCLC, stanza XXVIII, pages 161–162

   The excitement was palpable for believers and non-believers alike. Next, Francis declined to move into the gilded papal apartment vacated by his predecessor. Instead he was going to remain in the small room in the Santa Marta hostel in the Vatican where he had stayed during the conclave.

   2025 April 21, Peter Stanford, “Pope Francis obituary”, in The Guardian

2. A temporary refuge for the homeless providing a bed and sometimes food.
3. obsoleteA 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 other

   1577, Raphaell Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande […], volume I, London: […] [Henry Bynneman] for Iohn Harrison, →OCLC

4. obsoleteA 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 AfricaSouth AsiaA university or school dormitory, a place of accommodation for students.

present singular third person hostels · US participle present hosteling · UK participle present hostelling · US participle past hosteled · US past hosteled · UK participle past hostelled · UK past hostelled

1. intransitiveTo stay in a hostel during one's travels.
2. transitiveTo lodge (a person) in a hostel.