A slot is a narrow slit or opening for receiving something, especially a coin. A slot can also be an assigned place in a schedule or plan, as in “I can slot you in at 2 pm.” It can also mean the location of a hole in the side of a box or the notch between the tips of certain birds’ primaries that helps maintain smooth air flow over the wings during flight.
A gaming machine that uses reels to display symbols and pay out winning combinations based on the paytable. Usually, these symbols vary depending on the theme of the game and may include traditional icons such as fruits, bells, or stylized lucky sevens. Some slots offer a progressive jackpot or other bonus features in addition to regular payouts.
The first slot machine was invented in 1887 by Charles Fey, who improved on the earlier machines by allowing players to insert cash rather than coins and adding automatic payouts. Fey’s invention became wildly popular, and soon casinos were filled with slot machines.
Modern slot machines use microprocessors to assign a different probability to each symbol on each of the machine’s reels. This allows manufacturers to increase the number of symbols and paylines without increasing the overall cost of the machine. However, these changes do not always benefit the player. In some cases, a single symbol might appear to be very close to a winning combination but actually be much farther away than it appears.
A small slit in a piece of furniture, often used for a light or power cord.
In a cable street-railroad car, a narrow continuous opening through which the grip on a car passes to connect with the traveling cable.
An assigned, scheduled time and place for an aircraft to take off or land, as authorized by an airport or air-traffic control. Also called a gate slot.
A position or job, especially one involving responsibility or prestige: He was given the slot as chief copy editor.
In computing, a position for a program or function in a computer system, often represented by a symbolic constant, such as 1 + 2, 2 + 3, etc. Also, a logical position in the order of execution of a computer program, or of a series of operations.
In database management, a slit in a disk that stores a file or set of files. Each slit is assigned a unique file name and is often located in the same file system as the data it contains, although this is not always the case. The term is sometimes used for a virtual disk drive, such as the ones in the SAN (storage area network) that replace traditional magnetic hard drives. A slit can be either a read/write slit or a read-only slit.