Providing or offering students somewhere to live has for some eight centuries in Britain and mainland Europe been part of the need and the mission--even the definition--of a university and other forms of higher education. The characteristics and declared purposes of "somewhere to live" have changed profoundly from phase to phase of higher education development, as has its vocabulary--halls, hostels, rooms, houses, lodgings, colleges, residences, accommodation. The changes of vocabulary have reflected changes in both student constituencies and their institutions. This article addresses questions concerning the basic changes in "somewhere to live" in the late twentieth century, and its relationship to the rapid expansion and diversification of the higher education system, notably in England. The vocabularies of residence and accommodation in this period reflected and were part of these changes. The vocabularies raise important questions about how and why something once commonly held to be a "tradition" was either fundamentally modified, or was abandoned. Here, the author discusses the early forms of student accommodation and student residence. He contends that higher education, its institutions and its national policy and funding machineries, had for whatever reasons failed to even consider making a case for how, in the move into mass higher education, it dealt with past understandings of the purposes of "residence", the nature of transitional phases to "accommodation", and an approach to "somewhere to live" that looked surprisingly like a modern version of the condition of students in the thirteenth century. (Contains 49 notes.)