A slot is a place in a queue, a position on a schedule, or an assignment or job. A slot can also refer to the area in front of a goal or on an ice hockey rink where the face-off circles are.
The word slot is also used as a metaphor for a certain way that casinos try to maximize their profits without overdoing it, because they know players can detect these hidden increases in house advantages and will move elsewhere if they get too high. The most obvious example is the infamous “free spin” bonus that casinos sometimes offer to their customers.
In the context of computer games, a slot is an operation issued to an execution unit (also called a functional unit or FU). In very long instruction word (VLIW) computers, the term stub may be used for this concept instead, as it denotes the portion of the code that is unrelated to the actual operation. In some cases, the term slot is also used to refer to a portion of memory that is reserved for use by the VLIW implementation.