A narrow opening, especially one for receiving something, as a coin or a letter. (Compare with slit, notch, and aperture.) He slotted the coin in the slot and dialed. A position or time period assigned to an activity, as in the case of a meeting or an appointment: The conference room was scheduled for this afternoon’s slot.
A slot in a machine is a vertically aligned row of slot indosat symbols that spin after a lever or button has been pushed, or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, a paper ticket with a barcode scanned at an entrance terminal. If the symbols land in a winning combination, the player earns credits based on a payout table. A winning combination of symbols may also unlock a bonus feature, such as free spins or a jackpot level.
In modern slot games, which often have more than a dozen paylines and a variety of symbols and payouts, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that is going on. To help players, many developers include information tables known as pay tables that display how the symbols work and their payout values.
A slot is also an administrative unit of an airport, used to assign runway capacity to airlines according to their priority of departure or arrival times. Air traffic management slots, issued by EUROCONTROL, are a type of air-traffic control allocation and can be traded. The word is derived from the Dutch noun slot, meaning “narrow passage.” Other similar words include sleuth and rut.