A dormitory is a room or building with many beds for communal sleeping, especially for students. A hostel is a type of cheap, shared accommodation for travellers, which often contains dormitory-style rooms. In short, a hostel is a place to stay; a dormitory is the room you sleep in, whether at university or inside that hostel.
The core difference
A dormitory is a shared sleeping room or building; a hostel is a whole lodging establishment, often with dormitories inside it.
- dormitory — a large room or building with many beds used for communal sleeping, especially by students: She spent her first year of university living in a noisy dormitory.
- hostel — cheap, shared lodging for travellers, often with dormitory-style rooms: We stayed in a youth hostel in Prague for ten dollars a night.
How to tell them apart
A dormitory names the room or building, not the business it belongs to — it is where you find rows of beds, whether at a university or inside a hostel. A hostel is the establishment itself: a whole place offering cheap, shared lodging, typically to travellers, which may well contain a dormitory as one of its room types.
Dormitory has a second sense worth knowing: a dormitory town or suburb, whose residents live there but commute elsewhere for work. That use has nothing to do with beds — it describes a place people sleep in and leave each morning.
