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The Marwar Hall at Umaid Bhawan Palace, Jodhpur, India
A hallway at the Royal York Hotel

In architecture, a hall is a relatively large space enclosed by a roof and walls.[1] In the Iron Age, a mead hall was such a simple building and was the residence of a lord and his retainers. Later, rooms were partitioned from it, so that today the hall of a house is the space inside the front door through which the rooms are reached. Where the hall inside the front door of a house is elongated, it may be called a passage, corridor, or hallway.

The term hall is often used to designate a British or Irish country house such as a hall house, or specifically a Wealden hall house, and manor houses.

In later medieval Europe, the main room of a castle or manor house was the great hall. In a medieval building, the hall was where the fire was kept. With time, its functions as dormitory, kitchen, parlour and so on were divided off to separate rooms or, in the case of the kitchen, a separate building.


Many buildings at colleges and universities are formally titled "_______ Hall", typically being named after the person who endowed it, for example, King's Hall, Cambridge. Others, such as Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, commemorate respected people. Between these in age, Nassau Hall at Princeton University began as the single building of the then college. In medieval origin, these were the halls in which the members of the university lived together during term time. In many cases, some aspect of this community remains.

At colleges in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Hall is the dining hall for students, with High Table at one end for fellows. Typically, at "Formal Hall", gowns are worn for dinner during the evening, whereas for "informal Hall" they are not.





Firehall (London, Ontario) in 1923


See also[edit]


  1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary

External links[edit]

  • The dictionary definition of hall at Wiktionary
  • Media related to Halls at Wikimedia Commons