Mixed-sex education, (or just Mixed education), also known as Coeducation, is the integrated education to males and females at the same school facilities. The opposite situation is described as single-sex education. Most older institutions of higher education restricted their enrollment to a single sex at some point in their history, and since then have changed their policies to become coeducational.
Co-ed (or coed) is the shortened adjectival form of "Coeducation", and the word co-ed is sometimes also used, in the United States, as a noun to refer to a female student at a coeducational college or university. This usage reflects the historical process by which it was often female pupils who were admitted to schools originally reserved for boys, and thus it was them who were identified with its becoming "coeducational".
The word is also often used to describe a situation in which both genders are integrated in any form (e.g. "The team is co-ed").
