Winchester College - Boarding Houses

Boarding Houses

The Scholars live in the original buildings, known as College; an individual scholar is known as a "Collegeman". College is not usually referred to as a house, except for the purposes of categorisation: hence the terms 'housemaster of College' and 'College house' are not generally used. The housemaster of College is now known as the 'Master in College', though these duties formerly belonged to the Second Master. Within the school, 'College' refers only to the body of scholars (and their buildings); 'Winchester College' and 'the college' refer to the school as a whole.

Every pupil at Winchester, apart from the Scholars, lives in a boarding house, chosen or allocated when applying to Winchester. It is here that he studies, eats and sleeps. Each house is presided over by a housemaster (who takes on the role in addition to teaching duties) and a number of house tutors (usually five or six – Mon to Fri). Houses compete in school competitions, mostly in sporting competitions. Each house has an official name, usually based on the family name of the first housemaster, which is used mainly as a postal address. Each house also has an informal name, which is more frequently used in speech, usually based on the name or nickname of an early housemaster. Each house also has a letter assigned to it, in the order of their founding, to act as an abbreviation, especially on laundry tags. A member of a house is described by the informal name of the house with "-ite" suffixed, as "a Furleyite", "a Toyeite", "a Cookite" and so on. The houses have been ordered by their year of founding. College does not have an informal name, although the abbreviation Coll is sometimes used, especially on written work. It also has a letter assigned to it, X, but it is considered bad form to use this except as a laundry mark or in lists of sporting fixtures. (In the early 20th century the Commoner houses were limited to 35 members each, and for sporting purposes College was divided into "College East" and "College West", denoted by X and Y respectively. This division is now wholly obsolete.)

Each house also had a set of house colours, which adorned the ribbon worn around boys' "strats" (straw hats). The wearing of strats was abolished for Commoners in around 1984 – Collegemen had ceased to wear them years earlier. They can however still occasionally be seen being sported on Winchester Day. House colours are now used on socks and "pussies", a form of scarf, usually awarded for exceptional contribution to the house or society.