The Freshman, when once safe through his examination, is first inducted into his rooms by a _gyp_, usually recommended to him by his tutor. The gyp (from [Greek: gyps], vulture, evidently a nickname at first, but now the only name applied to this class of persons) is a college servant, who attends upon a number of students, sometimes as many as twenty, calls them in the morning, brushes their clothes, carries for them parcels and the queerly twisted notes they are continually writing to one another, waits at their parties, and so on. Cleaning their boots is not in his branch of the profession; there is a regular brigade of college shoeblacks.--_Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ._, Ed. 2d, p. 14. 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.