Oxbridge

The term is used to refer to them collectively, in contrast to other British universities, and more broadly to describe characteristics reminiscent of them, often with implications of superior social or intellectual status or elitism.

In William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Pendennis, published in 1850, the main character attends the fictional Boniface College, Oxbridge.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word was by Virginia Woolf, who, citing William Makepeace Thackeray, referenced it in her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own."

[5] In addition to being a collective term, Oxbridge is often used as shorthand for characteristics the two institutions share: The word Oxbridge may also be used pejoratively: as a descriptor of social class (referring to the professional classes who dominated the intake of both universities at the beginning of the twentieth century),[24] as shorthand for an elite that "continues to dominate Britain's political and cultural establishment"[10][25] and a parental attitude that "continues to see UK higher education through an Oxbridge prism",[26] or to describe a "pressure-cooker" culture that attracts and then fails to support overachievers "who are vulnerable to a kind of self-inflicted stress that can all too often become unbearable"[27] and high-flying state school students who find "coping with the workload very difficult in terms of balancing work and life" and "feel socially out of [their] depth".

Camford is, however, used as the name of a fictional university city in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Creeping Man (1923).