Vestibule

Vestibule a hall or antechamber next to the entrance, from which doors open to the various rooms or passages of a house. This is the Vitruvian and the modern sense; but the latter includes any lobby; porch, or anteroom through which a larger apartment or a house, etc., is entered. Vestibulum, in mediaeval Latin, is also used for the vestiarium, or vestry, and sometimes for the nave, the ecclesia being strictly the choir only. The origin of the word is disputed, but it is probable that it first signified the entrance-chamber to the baths, where the clothes of the bather were laid aside; and hence the entrance to a house or any public edifice.