hall, a communicating passageway or, in medieval buildings, the large main room. In the feudal castle of N Europe it was a single apartment, and in it lord and retainers lounged, ate, and slept. From the hearth in its center the smoke rose to an outlet in the roof. At one end was the raised dais reserved for the master and those of his own rank. With developing amenities extra spaces were added for cooking and sleeping, and the hall advanced beyond its early rude and unfinished appearance. In English manor houses of the 14th and 15th cent. the characteristic great hall was covered by a fine open-timber roof, heated by one or more huge fireplaces, and lighted with lofty windows often arranged in deep, projecting bays. Westminster Hall, part of the ancient royal palace commenced in the 11th cent. and rebuilt in the 14th cent., was the most splendid. By the 17th cent., with the addition of drawing room, library, and bedrooms, the hall of the English house was no longer of great size and dominance. The English colleges of the Middle Ages and Renaissance also had halls or commons, chiefly for dining, that were architecturally similar to the baronial examples. Some were covered with fine fan vaults, others with timber roofs as at Christ Church, Oxford, perhaps the most splendid hall next to Westminster. The various guilds of N Europe had their halls, especially impressive in Flanders, e.g., the cloth halls at Bruges, Brussels, and Ypres. In Italy communal independence produced the remarkable series of local civic halls, often with imposing towers, as at Siena and Florence. The word hall came to be used in the title of many great English houses (Haddon Hall) and similarly in that of some Southern estates in the American colonies.

Several things are commonly known as Halls or halls. For the development of meaning of the word 'hall', see Hall (concept).

A hall is fundamentally a relatively large space enclosed by a roof and walls. 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 from which the rooms are reached.

Thus:

• Deriving from the above, a hall is often the term used to designate a British or Irish country house.
• In later medieval Europe, the main room of a castle or manor house was the great hall.
• Where the hall inside the front door of a house is elongated, it may be called a passage, or hallway. The corresponding space upstairs is a landing.
• 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.

On the same principle:

• 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.
• Many Livery Companies (e.g., in the City of London) have a Hall that is their headquarters and meeting place.

Similarly:

• A hall is also a building consisting largely of a principal room, that is rented out for meetings and social affairs. It may be privately or government-owned, such as a function hall owned by one company used for weddings and cotillions (organized and run by the same company on a contractual basis) or a community hall available for rent to anyone.

Following a line of similar development:

• In office buildings and larger buildings (theatres, cinemas etc), the entrance hall is generally known as the foyer (the French for fire-place). The atrium, a name sometimes used in public buildings for the entrance hall, was the central courtyard of a Roman house.

Derived from the residential meanings of the word:

• Hall is also a surname of people, one of whose ancestors lived in a hall as distinct from one such as David M. Cote, whose ancestor will have lived in a cote, a much humbler place shared with the livestock.

Association with salt

From a completely separate derivation:

A Hall is a brand of bitter (beer) made in Germany and sold worldwide, mainly across America.

• In German speaking areas, Hall (with a short a) can also form part of a town name, like Halle, where the name refers to hall, the Celtic word for salt (compare Welsh halen or Breton holen or Cornish holan). In this connection, Hall is the short form of the name of:
• the medieval German town Schwäbisch Hall, where Hall was its whole name prior to 1933
• the Austrian town Hall in Tirol near Innsbruck, which used to be called Solbad Hall from 1938 to 1974,
• Hallstatt in Austria which gave its name to the Celtic Hallstatt culture.

Sir Charles Hallé (originally Karl Halle) lent his name to the Hallé Orchestra. His forbears were probably associated with the German town of Halle. The accent was added to his name in order to assist English-speakers in pronouncing the word.

In the ancient world, the Celts were neighbours of the Greeks whose word for salt was halos (`αλοσ). While European science was developing, some branches of it adopted the Greek language as the source of its terminology. We therefore have words like halogen, halide, halotrichite and halocarbon.