A narrow notch, groove or opening, as in a keyway or the slit for a coin in a slot machine. Also used in the plural as a position within a group, series, sequence or schedule. I was slotted into management training. The student was slotted into the final class of the course. In sports, the slot is the space between the posts for kicking a goal in Australian rules football and rugby league. The syllable may also be used as a verb meaning ‘to place in or assign to a slot’: He was sloted into the first-team slot.
The sixties were turbulent in many ways, and the casino industry was no exception. That decade saw the introduction of electromechanical slot machines that replaced the earlier mechanical models, which had to be pulled by hand to spin and pay out winnings. The new machines were faster, less prone to failure and could offer much larger payouts.
These new machines came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with multiple pay lines and more symbols than the old poker card icons. Charles Fey’s machine was a great improvement over previous models. Unlike the Sittman and Pitt invention, it allowed automatic payouts and had three reels. Its most distinctive feature was that it allowed players to win by lining up three of the same symbol on a payline. This gave the machine its name – the slot machine.
Today’s slot machines are programmed to weight particular symbols, so that they appear more often than others. This is done by adjusting the number of symbols in each reel, which affects the odds of hitting a specific combination on the pay line. Many slot machines allow you to see the pay table and the odds of winning by pressing a ‘help’ button or ‘i’ on their touch screens, or asking a slot attendant.
Linguistics(esp. tagmemics) A grammatical slot within a construction into which a given morpheme can fit; a morpheme-space. (also slot)
(aviation) An allocated time for a flight to take off or land at an airport, authorized by air traffic control.
A slot is not to be confused with a clearance, which is an authorization to fly at a particular airport in the absence of a slot.
Slots are used around the world to manage air traffic at busy airports and prevent repeated delays that would otherwise occur because too many aircraft try to land or take off at the same time.
In computing, a position in memory or on a disk etc., into which data can be stored or retrieved. Each slot is mapped to a slot type, which determines how the bot will process the information in the slot. For example, a bot might recognize that “rooms required” is the slot to book a hotel room, while the slot “flight code” is used to handle cancellations. You can create custom slot types by clicking Add Slot Type in the Slots page or in the Utterances tab. A custom slot type can be a regular expression or another kind of text pattern that the bot should look for in utterances.