A slot is a position or place in which something can be inserted or placed. A slot can also refer to a specific time or place where an event will occur, such as the end of a game when a jackpot is won. A slot can be fixed or random, depending on how the game is designed. In a video slot, the jackpot is won when the winning combination of symbols appears on a reel or multiple reels. The maths of how the jackpot is won is built into the software that powers the slot and can vary between games. It may be a fixed probability event, such as one in 6.43 million spins, or it could be based on the amount of money staked across all slots, or a randomly selected time, date or jackpot size.

The term is also used to describe a specific location on a motherboard, for example an ISA, PCI or AGP slot. It can also refer to a specific position in an office or organisation, such as the chief copy editor’s slot at the Gazette.

In computing, a slot describes the operation issue and data path machinery surrounding a set of execution units (also known as functional units or FUs). It is also used to describe a part of a computer that performs a single type of operation, such as a memory slot. In long instruction word (VLIW) computers, the concept of a slot is sometimes referred to as an execute pipeline or a processor core.

A specialized table slot that is used to hold data that repeats over a period of time. For example, a set of monthly evaporation coefficients for a reservoir would be held in a periodic slot. The timeseries associated with the slot can be regular (1 Hour, 1 Day, etc) or irregular and can be numeric or text.

The Slot Viewer shows different menu options based on which slot is highlighted. Highlighting multiple slots will disable many of these menu options. In some cases, such as with Expression Slots or Series Slots with Periodic Input, highlighting a slot will open the slot dialog where all the configuration and menu options are available.

In video slot, a random number generator (RNG) is used to generate a sequence of numbers that corresponds to the stops on a reel. The random number is then compared with a sequence of symbols that appear on the slot to determine which combination of symbols wins the jackpot. In the past, this was a manual process that involved a lot of calculating. The RNG now does this automatically, though some machines still use manual processes for this purpose.

In a traditional mechanical slot machine, the odds of hitting a jackpot are based on the amount of money staked, the number of coins or tokens placed and the number of winning combinations on each payline. In newer slot machines, the odds are determined by the number of possible combinations and how they are weighted. The most common weighting is that the highest value symbol has a greater chance of appearing on the reels.