A slit or other narrow opening, esp. one for receiving something, such as a coin or a letter. Also: a position or assignment, as in the title of an office or job (e.g., Chief Copy Editor).

A slot is a placeholder on a Web page that either waits for content to be added (a passive slot) or calls out to a renderer to fill it in (an active slot). A web application often uses slots to control what happens when an event or scenario triggers.

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Although some gamblers may enjoy playing slots simply because of their arousal, this is probably not the whole story. A significant percentage of people who play slots do so as a way of coping with painful emotional experiences, including depression and anxiety. The continuous nature of slot machine play, combined with its attention-grabbing rewards, may help distract them from these experiences.

A slot in a computer is the hardware and software that manages memory access and instruction issuing for one or more execution units. In very long instruction word (VLIW) computers, the term is synonymous with an execute pipeline. In other types of computer, such as dynamically scheduled machines, a slot is an area of memory that is shared among multiple execution units. The number of available slots in a computer depends on the operating system, but is usually fixed. A slot is usually implemented as a hardware register in a microprocessor, but it can also be implemented as software in a peripheral device.