Commonrooms

Each House at Hogwarts has a common room, guarded by an entrance which requires the correct password before it allows anyone to enter. All of the common rooms must be very large – according to JK, there are around 1000 pupils at the school, which means in each house there are approximately 250. Particularly during the winter there are very few other places to go in the evening, which means that each room must be designed to accommodate the full complement. In order to provide adequate seating for this number of people, the rooms must be pretty big. The details of each common room are as follows:

Gryffindor

Location: Seventh floor, in Gryffindor Tower.

Entrance: The portrait of a fat lady in a pink silk dress (universally known as the “Fat Lady”) hides a round hole in the wall, which is the entrance. When the correct password is stated, the portrait swings up to allow people to enter. Following the attack on the Fat Lady by Sirius Black in 1993, she was temporarily replaced by a portrait of Sir Cadogan and his fat grey pony.

Passwords: Balderdash, Banana Fritters, Caput Draconis, Fairy Lights, Flibbertigibbet, Fortuna Major, Mimbulus Mimbletonia, Pig Snout, Wattlebird (all from the Fat Lady).
Oddsbodkins, Scurvy Cur (from Sir Cadogan).

General: The centrepiece of the Gryffindor Common Room is a large fireplace, which Harry has occasionally used to communicate with Sirius via the Floo Network. It also contains a large number of chairs and tables, and a noticeboard on which important announcements are placed. Two staircases lead up to the dormitories, where the students sleep. There is one set of dormitories for girls, and one for boys. The stairs to the girls rooms are guarded by a charm that turns them into a slide if a boy attempts to climb them. The boys’ stairs are not protected in such a way, however, which must leave ample snogging opportunities when required.

Harry sleeps in a round room with four other students: Neville, Ron, Dean and Seamus. Dormitories are split by year groups, and each student has a four-poster bed to sleep in. Based on the quantity of students in each house, there must be a number of these rooms for each year, as there should be just under 20 students of each sex per house per year.

Students spend a great deal of their time in the Gryffindor common room, doing homework, socialising, or in the case of Fred and George Weasley, paying younger pupils to test their experimental joke shop products for them.

Hufflepuff

Location: Unclear. Different books suggest it is either on the first floor or a below ground floor level. In the Philosopher’s Stone (following the Hallowe’en troll incident), Harry and Ron climb a flight of stairs before joining a group of Hufflepuffs heading for their dormitory, and then ducking off towards the toilets on the same floor. This suggests that the common room is on the first floor. However in Goblet of Fire, after the announcement of the Four Champions, Cedric Diggory heads off down the stairs from the ground floor, presumably to go to his common room.

These two are incompatible: if the common room was below ground level, there would have been no need for the Hufflepuffs to climb the stairs to the first floor when the troll broke in – they would have headed straight downstairs. On the other hand, Cedric never said he was going to the common room, he could have been going somewhere else. Conventional wisdom suggests that Cedric was indeed going to the common room, and that the wandering Hufflepuffs were lost – although even the first years had been in school for two months by this stage so this does seem rather unlikely. Universal agreement is that the Hufflepuff common room is on the below ground floor level, however, although we’re still not so sure.

Entrance: Unknown.

Password: Unknown

General: No further facts are known about the Hufflepuff common room.

Ravenclaw

Location: Ravenclaw tower, in the west of the castle.

Entrance: Unknown.

Password: Unknown.

General: No further facts are known about the Ravenclaw common room.

Slytherin

Location: Somewhere in the heart of the labyrinth of passages in the dungeons.

Entrance: In a bare, damp stone wall. A concealed door slides open when the correct password is given.

Password: Pure-Blood.

General: The Slytherin common room is a low, long room with rough stone walls and ceiling. Round green lamps, hung from the ceiling with chains, light the room. In front of the door is a fire-place with an elaborately-carved mantelpiece. Carved chairs are dotted around the room.

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