It is sometimes spelled Jip, though probably by mistake.

My Jip brought one in this morning; faith! and told me I was focussed.—­Gent.  Mag., 1794, p. 1085.

H.

HALF-LESSON.  In some American colleges on certain occasions the students are required to learn only one half of the amount of an ordinary lesson.

They promote it [the value of distinctions conferred by the students on one another] by formally acknowledging the existence of the larger debating societies in such acts as giving “half-lessons” for the morning after the Wednesday night debates.—­Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 386.

HALF-YEAR.  In the German universities, a collegiate term is called a half-year.

The annual courses of instruction are divided into summer and winter half-years.—­Howitt’s Student Life of Germany, Am.  Ed., pp. 34, 35.

HALL.  A college or large edifice belonging to a collegiate institution.—­Webster.

2.  A collegiate body in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  In the former institution a hall differs from a college, in that halls are not incorporated; consequently, whatever estate or other property they possess is held in trust by the University.  In the latter, colleges and halls are synonymous.—­Cam. and Oxf.  Calendars.

“In Cambridge,” says the author of the Collegian’s Guide, “the halls stand on the same footing as the colleges, but at Oxford they did not, in my time, hold by any means so high a place in general estimation.  Certainly those halls which admit the outcasts of other colleges, and of those alone I am now speaking, used to be precisely what one would expect to find them; indeed, I had rather that a son of mine should forego a university education altogether, than that he should have so sorry a counterfeit of academic advantages as one of these halls affords.”—­p. 172.

“All the Colleges at Cambridge,” says Bristed, “have equal privileges and rights, with the solitary exception of King’s, and though some of them are called Halls, the difference is merely one of name.  But the Halls at Oxford, of which there are five, are not incorporated bodies, and have no vote in University matters, indeed are but a sort of boarding-houses at which students may remain until it is time for them to take a degree.  I dined at one of those establishments; it was very like an officers’ mess.  The men had their own wine, and did not wear their gowns, and the only Don belonging to the Hall was not present at table.  There was a tradition of a chapel belonging to the concern, but no one present knew where it was.  This Hall seemed to be a small Botany Bay of both Universities, its members made up of all sorts of incapables and incorrigibles.”—­Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, pp. 140, 141.

3.  At Cambridge and Oxford, the public eating-room.