A narrow notch, groove, or opening, such as a keyway in machinery or a slit for a coin in a vending machine. Also: a position in a group, series, or sequence. Examples: She slotted the coin into the slot on the vending machine. He slipped the disk into its slot in the dash.
In a slot machine, the slots are the lines that pay out winnings when a certain combination of symbols line up on a reel. Vintage machines used to have only one pay line, but today’s video slot games can have up to 50 different paylines, and some have extra symbols that make it possible for players to win even if they don’t get all the right combinations on their reels.
Some gamblers believe that if a slot has gone a long time without paying off, it’s “due” to hit soon. This is nonsense, because every spin is independent of the previous ones, and the only thing that determines whether or not a machine will pay off is the combination of symbols it lands on a given spin.
A vacancy in a group, series, or sequence. For example, the position of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is a prestigious and influential slot. The term is also used to refer to a position on a team or in an organization, such as the captain’s slot on the football team. These examples come from corpora and from sources on the web. They may contain sensitive content.