dormitory

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A building for housing a number of persons, as at a school or resort.
• noun A room providing sleeping quarters for a number of persons.
• noun A community whose inhabitants commute to a nearby city for employment and recreation.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A place, building, or room to sleep in.
• noun That part of a boarding-school or other institution where the inmates sleep, usually a large room, either open or divided by low partitions, or a series of rooms opening upon a common hall or corridor: in American colleges, sometimes an entire building divided into sleeping-rooms.
• noun A burial-place; a cemetery. See cemetery, which has the same etymological meaning.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A sleeping room, or a building containing a series of sleeping rooms; a sleeping apartment capable of containing many beds; esp., one connected with a college or boarding school.
• noun obsolete A burial place.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A room containing a number of beds (and often some other furniture and/or utilities) for sleeping, often applied to student and backpacker accommodation of this kind. Common abbreviation: dorm
• noun A building or part of a building which houses students, soldiers, monks etc. who sleep there and use communal further facilities.
• noun Short for dormitory town, a suburban or rural settlement housing city workers

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a large sleeping room containing several beds
• noun a college or university building containing living quarters for students