A slot is a narrow opening, notch, groove, or hole, such as the keyway in a piece of machinery or a slit for a coin in a vending machine. The term may also refer to a position in a sequence or series, such as the fourth position on an ice hockey team, or a place or time, such as a weekly appointment or a meeting time. See also time slot, slit, and aperture.
The earliest slot machines were invented in 1899 by Charles Fey and resembled the pinwheels used to spin tops. These early machines required the operator to insert a coin into a slot to activate a lever or button that caused the reels to spin. They paid out credits if the symbols lined up in a payline, but winning combinations were rare. Fey’s improvements included automatic payouts and a lever that allowed the player to select specific combinations of symbols. He replaced the poker symbols with hearts, diamonds, spades, horseshoes, and Liberty bells.
Fey also improved the mechanical layout of the machine and added a reel-to-reel brake to prevent erratic spinning. Modern slot machines often have several reels, multiple pay lines, and a variety of symbols. In addition to the standard winning combinations, many slot games have bonus rounds and other special features that increase the player’s chances of winning.
In computing, a slot is a dynamic placeholder that waits for (passive) or calls out for content (active). A slot contains a single type of repository item and can be fed by either an Add Items to Slot action or a Targeter. Slots work together with scenarios to deliver content to pages; renderers specify how the content is presented.
A slot can be found in various places on a page, including the header, footer, and sidebar. It is also possible to place a slot in a container, such as a table or list. A slot can be manipulated with CSS using the DOM element slot property, and with Javascript using the method slot().
A slot is an area of a screen where a user can enter text or graphics. Most browsers provide a default slot for the address bar, and it is also common for Web applications to use slots as a means of organizing content on the page.