a1300 Early Compl. Eng. Prose Psalter cvi. 16 He forgnod yhates,..And slottes irened brake he þare.

c1340 Nominale (Skeat) 471 Sere, veroil et cerrure, Barre, slot and stapul.

1391 in J. T. Fowler Memorials Church SS. Peter & Wilfrid, Ripon (1888) III. 108 In iij slottes ferri pro camp'is (?) figend. 3d.

1424–5 in J. T. Fowler Extracts Acct. Rolls Abbey of Durham (1898) I. 272 j fenestra in domo carbonum, cum j slott, j stapill.

c1440 Promptorium Parvulorum 460/1 Slot, or schytyl of a dore, verolium.

1515 in J. B. Paul Accts. Treasurer Scotl. (1903) V. 13 Expensis..on lokkis, irne slottis, bandis of irne..for reparing and dichting of the palice.

1570 P. Levens Manipulus Vocabulorum sig. Oiv/2 Y^e Slot of a doore, pessulus.

1651 in J. Raine Depos. Castle of York (1861) 49 Who assaulted his house, attempting to break in by opening two slotts or boults.

1663 in Scottish Notes & Queries (1902) July 2 [They] did bring..ane number of yrons, bolts or slotts and caused put the samen vpon the doores.

1695 W. Kennett Parochial Antiq. Gloss. at Slade In Northumberland the slot of a door is the bolt.

1825– in many northern dialect glossaries.

1855 H. Ainslie Sc. Songs, Ballads, & Poems 98 Our Cadger..slippit in, Syne cannilie shot, the muckle door sloat.

1874 J. Crawford Mem. Alloa 76 He drew the slot, an'..In..the stranger passed.

1890 ‘W. A. Wallace’ Only a Sister 325 I did my best to put back the slot of one of the locks.

1799 Hull Advertiser 15 June 2/2 Timber. For sale,..harrow bulls and slots.

1808 in J. Jamieson Etymol. Dict. Sc. Lang.

1844 H. Stephens Bk. of Farm II. 527 Four longitudinal bars,..with four lighter transverse bars, or slots.

1846 J. Baxter Libr. Pract. Agric. (ed. 4) II. 359 The ‘slots’ or cross-pieces of thin ash.

?1523 J. Fitzherbert Bk. Husbandry f. iii At the plough tayle where be two wedges that be called slote wedges the one is in the slote above the beam, another in the sayd slote vnder the plough beam.

1577 W. Harrison Descr. Eng. (1877) I. ii. xi. 227 A square blocke of wood.., which dooth ride vp and downe in a slot, rabet, or regall betweene two pieces of timber.

1747 W. Hooson Miners Dict. sig. Siv Formerly the Fork[s] were used to be Tennerd, and the Sills made with Slotts to put them in.

1825 ‘J. Nicholson’ Operative Mechanic 435 The catch-box has a slot, fitting a feather on the spindle.

1850 J. Chubb On Constr. Locks & Keys 33 A brass guard, in which there was a slot for a pin to slide in.

1881 F. Young Every Man his own Mechanic 76 Mortising machines and others for boring and making slots in timber.

1888 Pall Mall Gaz. 25 Sept. 5/1 ‘Drop a penny into the slot’ and you can..obtain a cigarette.

1893 Times 28 Apr. 9/3 The Chancellor..has had recourse to the latest automatic invention, and has put a penny in the slot.

1950 R. P. Bissell Stretch on River xiii. 135 The slots are going night and day.

1978 M. Puzo Fools Die xviii. 197 The slots usually brought in a profit of about a hundred thousand dollars a week.

1917 H. Grant Two Sides of Atlantic iii. 44 The man who ‘sits in the slot’ (the chief-sub.), will know for a certainty that the decision of ‘Bill’ to invade Windy City will automatically entail the departure of all who ‘hunt’ with Bill.

1923 W. G. Bleyer Newspaper Writing & Editing (rev. ed.) i. 10 The copy-desk is semicircular in form, and the head copy-reader sits in the ‘slot’, or inside of the desk, while the copy-readers occupy places around the outside, or ‘rim’.

1970 R. K. Kent Lang. Journalism 123 Slot, the middle of the horseshoe~shaped copy desk where the news editor or copy editor (sometimes called slotman) sits. To be in the slot is to be in charge of the copy desk.

1920 Flight 12 1124/1 It has already been mentioned that the slot separating the false from the main leading edge is contracted towards the upper surface.

1936 Discovery Mar. 73/2 The Weick and Hammond have..a control which is a combination of slot and aileron. This is intended to obviate the need of a rudder.

1960 C. H. Gibbs-Smith Aeroplane ii. 221 Ingenious as the machine undoubtedly was,..there is no visible trace of any slots, or of any wires or other gear attached to, or passing anywhere near, the wings that could be associated with slots.

1942 L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §121/38 Female pudendum..shape, slot, snatch, tail.

1977 C. Miller & K. Swift Words & Women vii. 117 No such positive connotations attach to prick, but even this word does not convey the absolute scorn of slit, slot, snatch, and gash.

1944 R. Chandler Lady in Lake xiii. 74 I..parked in one of the diagonal slots at the side of the Prescott Hotel.

1968 A. Diment Great Spy Race iii. 35 I shunted my car into a small slot near the fire station.

1978 R. Ludlum Holcroft Covenant xvii. 195 Holcroft backed the car out of its slot, then drove through the entrance posts onto the country road.

1947 Pix 20 Sept. 15 Peter or slot, cell.

1969 Sydney Sunday Tel. 21 Dec. 14/4 ‘I'd hate to try and tot up the number of hooks and badges (rank and good conduct insignia) that little lot's whipped away since the ship came out.’.. ‘And what about the slot (cells) they've dished out. It must run into years!’

1976 Cleo (Austral.) Aug. 33 Some of the old heads are in the slot, he says. The slot is jail.

1808 J. Jamieson Etymol. Dict. Sc. Lang. The slot of a hill, a hollow in a hill, or between two ridges.

1959 Tararua 13 46 Slot, for a crevasse, sometimes used by climbers, is not necessary and is merely slang.

1968 K. Weatherly Roo Shooter 58 This was the roughest bit of country yet—short, miserable, scrubby trees and stringy bushes; broken country, high slots and hollows full of water.

1942 L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §672/10 Rank or rating in league, division, percentage ladder, slot.

1947 W. H. Auden in Amer. Scholar Autumn 404 Among the staring blemishes that mark War's havocking slot.

1956 Sat. Rev. (U.S.) 2 June 50/2 No management slot is harder to fill today than the research director's post.

1956 W. H. Whyte Organization Man ii. viii. 104 Sales work..is about the only slot they would qualify for if they took English or history.

1964 Economist 25 Jan. 327/2 There is a ‘slot’ in the market for a medium-range supersonic airliner.

1964 Economist 20 June 1369/3 The ‘slots’ once gained, were never given up [by regional TV stations].

1966 Listener 6 Oct. 518/1 It seems perverse that when the Monday evening ‘slot’ has been extended to as much as two hours for lesser fry, it should be made to stand at ninety minutes for The Merchant of Venice (Home Service, September 26).

1967 Listener 6 Apr. 467/3 ‘Theology, during the great controversies of the mid-nineteenth century, was anti-scientific.’.. (Try fitting Newman or even Kingsley into that slot!)

1969 Times 21 Nov. 23/5 How serious is the situation at Heathrow?.. There are no spare ‘slots’ into which landing and taking-off airliners can be fitted.

1970 Daily Tel. 3 Sept. 13/2 The first Radio London slot each day will be from 6.45 a.m. to 9 a.m., a blend of news, music, personalities and information called ‘Rush Hour’.

1972 Business Week 18 Mar. 81/1 Although he held a top slot at snia, he was lured away for the even bigger job at Alitalia.

1973 C. Bonington Next Horizon xxii. 298 An Italian millionaire..had permission for an autumn reconnaissance in 1972 to be followed by a spring attempt in 1973. Owing to sickness he gave up his autumn slot.

1974 Guardian 26 Mar. 14/1 Welland's script was accepted by the BBC for its ‘Play For Today’ slot.

1976 National Observer (U.S.) 24 Apr. 19 a/3 Stanford has 10,009 applications for 1,450 freshman slots next fall.

1976 A. Davis Television viii. 86 Suitable slots are normally of 90 to 120 minutes, with time for commercials to be taken out of this, but films are rarely obliging enough to run to exactly the length required.

1977 Film & Television Technician Mar. 6/4 The British programme-makers are actually pushing the Americans out of the number one slot in key Western Europe and Scandinavian countries.

1977 Times 25 Aug. 1/8 The importance of taking a flight ‘slot’ when it comes up.

1978 M. Puzo Fools Die xii. 131 After six months of free-lance work he offered me a magazine editor slot.

1980 Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts July 529/2 Many place Kokoschka in the slot ‘Expressionist’.

1957 K. L. Pike in General Linguistics Spring 36 The characteristics of a grammeme which in many instances are perhaps most readily recognized in current descriptions of a grammemic system are the functional slot with its class filler.

1959 W. H. Mittins in Quirk & Smith Teaching of English iv. 116 Some teachers..seek to achieve a kind of concentration and continuity by methodically working through batteries of vocabulary exercises in slot-filling..and the like.

1959 Amer. Speech 34 266 The core contrasts..can also be reached by way of the diaphonemic pattern, but a smaller set will emerge because of the phonetic integrity that is built into the diaphoneme. The criterion for assigning diaphonemically different entities to a single slot in the phonemic inventory is dialectal complementation among the contrasts.

1960 Elson & Pickett Beginning Morphol.-syntax ii. 16 A slot is a grammatical position or function (e.g. subject) which is filled by a list of mutually substitutable items (e.g. nouns). The tagmeme is the unit of grammatical arrangement involved in or resulting from this slot-class correlation.

1960 Elson & Pickett Beginning Morphol.-syntax ii. 37 Make a chart with the slot names.., listing fillers below each slot name.

1960 Elson & Pickett Beginning Morphol.-syntax iii. 40 As a filler class they can only be united by some such term as ‘subject slot fillers’.

1962 W. A. Stewart in F. A. Rice Study of Role of Second Languages in Asia, Africa, & Latin Amer. 21 Under various conditions, the same language may occupy more than one functional slot.

1964 E. Bach Introd. Transformational Gram. iii. 44 But the basic points of the slot-symbol and class-symbol description and the lack of context-sensitive rules remain untouched.

1964 Language 40 314 American slot-and-filler grammatical description.

1965 Word Study Feb. 3/1 Word groups filling noun slots and verb slots comprise the chief building blocks of utterances.

1970 B. M. H. Strang Hist. Eng. 25 When, through cross-cultural experience, speakers of one language are conscious of an ‘empty slot’ in their language which is filled in another language.., they may..fill the gap by borrowing the filler.

1972 Archivum Linguisticum 3 22 The lexical co-occurrence restrictions which hold between the fillers of predicate and subject slots are different from the restrictions which hold between the fillers of predicate and instrument slots.

1972 Computers & Humanities 7 14 Some recent publications include..‘Computerized Japanese Haiku’, which describes how the poems are created by slot-filling.

1972 M. L. Samuels Linguistic Evol. 65 A new slot-filler may arise from borrowing or creation, or the ‘pull’ of the empty slot may hasten a new process of extension in another existing word.

1981 Word 1980 31 230 He makes use of the slot-and-filler infrastructure, characteristic of tagmemics.

1879 Cassell's Techn. Educator (new ed.) IV. 392/2 As the slot-arm [in a lathe] oscillates, it gives a reciprocating motion to the shaping slide.

1844 H. Stephens Bk. of Farm II. 331 The slot-bar..is for the purpose of adjusting the length of the fourth foot of the machine to any inequalities of the barn~floor.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools Pl.J 2 The bottom of the slot bar is arranged with a capped bearing.

1839 A. Ure Dict. Arts 1109 The spindles with their bobbins revolve in two slot-bearings.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools Pl.J 2 These carriages and slot heads are quite independent of each other in all their motions.

1485 in W. H. Stevenson Rec. Borough Nottingham (1885) III. 244 For boryng of ij. slott holes in a bote stake.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools Pl.H 9 The tools are fixed..in square slot holes.

1867 W. H. Smyth & E. Belcher Sailor's Word-bk. Slot-hoop, the same as truss-hoops.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools 167 The axis..of the slot-lever.

1888 Lockwood's Dict. Mech. Engin. 285 The slot link..of an engine, which, through the medium of the eccentrics, alters the valve for forward or backward motion.

1835 A. Ure Philos. Manuf. 119 The slot-piece b adjusts the roller a, and a similar slot-piece..adjusts the roller b.

1891 Daily News 28 Dec. 3/1 In the concrete..are embedded at intervals cast iron tube frames, to which the slot rails are bolted.

1892 D. A. Low Introd. Machine Drawing 108 What is the object of the slotway in the upper part of the ram?

a1884 E. H. Knight Pract. Dict. Mech. Suppl. 823/2 Slot Borer, a tool used for opening the cut in connection with slotting machines.

a1884 E. H. Knight Pract. Dict. Mech. Suppl. 823/2 Slot-boring Machine.

1875 E. H. Knight Amer. Mech. Dict. III. 2215/1 Slot-drilling Machine.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools 169 Crank and Slot~headed Sliding Rod.

1946 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engineers 93 iiia. 626/1 It would appear that slot aerials are capable of making a contribution to the problem of designing a radiating element that produces circular polarization in all directions of radiation.

1956 B.B.C. Handbk. 1957 56 To keep staff up to date, training supplements on such items as slot aerials, television lighting, frequency modulation, and other developments are issued.

1946 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engineers 93 iiia. 749/2 In spite of the length of the slot antenna, this load can be treated as lumped at the position of the centre of the slot.

1975 D. G. Fink Electronics Engineers' Handbk. xviii. 43 Very low profile slot antennas utilizing shallow cavities fed by coaxial cables have been designed for aircraft use.

1959 Washington Post 21 Nov. A14/4 He helped develop Elroy (Crazy~legs) Hirsch into a slotback with the Los Angeles Rams.

1970 Globe & Mail (Toronto) 28 Sept. 18/2 Slotback Dick Smith took a 12-yard pass from Sonny Wade in the second quarter for one Montreal touchdown.

1974 Anderson (S. Carolina) Independent 24 Apr. 5 b/1 At slot back..Rut Livingston..has the makings of a great player.

1966 Maclean's 22 Jan. 9 a The track on which slot cars race is a tabletop affair.

1971 Publishers' Weekly 27 Sept. 129/3 (advt.) The New Zealand Boys' Book of Crafts, Pets, Sports and Hobbies by Anthony Harvey and Peter Snell provides information on..model-making, rugby, sailing, slot cars, and wood-carving.

1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle Index July–Dec. 155/2 Slot machine.

1892 Pall Mall Gaz. 2 June 1/3 An ostrich's stomach is not filled with mechanism like a slot machine's.

a1910 ‘O. Henry’ Rolling Stones (1912) 196 Mac McGowan was to..drop his silver talent into the slit of the slot-machine of fame and fortune that gives up reputation and dough.

1929 Sun (Baltimore) 15 Nov. 1/6 ‘Spike’ O'Donnell,..beer baron and bootlegger,..is acting as his own lawyer in the ‘slot machine’ trial.

1933 C. Day Lewis Magnetic Mountain 12 Eating chocolate creams from the slot-machines.

1957 Observer 1 Sept. 13/4 At Las Vegas the plane empties of passengers who, with cold passion, play the slot-machines in the concourse until ten minutes later, when it is time to go.

1978 J. Wainwright Jury People lxiv. 216 A slot-machine arcade. One of these pin-table places.

1928 Amer. Speech 4 134 Presiding over the copy readers is the ‘head of the desk’ or ‘slot man’. His chief duty is to judge the amount of space to be given any ‘story’ or news article and to designate the size of the ‘headline’ or ‘head’.

1972 H. Evans Editing & Design: Newsman's Eng. i. 8 The copy is normally passed to a third executive, the ‘revise editor’. On American dailies he is a ‘slot man’.

1899 Westm. Gaz. 10 Aug. 2/2 A reduction of 2d. per thousand to those using the slot meter.

1966 Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.) 4 Feb. 13 (caption) J. P. Evans.. and Ed Johnson get ready to put their slot racers through a gruelling five-lap race.

1965 Wall St. Jrnl. 27 Aug. 22 A rapidly growing number of Americans..have caught the slot-racing bug.

1967 J. Symons Man who killed Himself i. vi. 69 I haven't joined a slot racing club... I like slot racing on my own.

1946 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engineers 93 iiia. 748/2 When slot radiators which were very loosely coupled to the guide had to be measured, standing-wave measurements of single slots became unreliable.

1967 IEEE Trans. Antennas & Propagation 15 826/1 If the boundaries of the dielectric cover are kept within the local reactive fields of the slot, the primary effect upon the radiation is a change in the impedance of the slot radiator.

1918 E. Wallbank & M. Wallbank Dress Cutting & Making x. 69 Slot Seam, in which both edges are overlapped on to a wrap piece or ‘slot’.

1968 J. Ironside Fashion Alphabet 99 Channel Seam (slot seam): to make a channel or slot seam, the seam turnings should be basted together. An additional strip of fabric should be laid under the basted seam and should then be machined approximately half-inch or so away from the basted seam line.

1958 Kinematograph Weekly (Studio Rev.) 29 May p. iv/3 If slot television gets a real hold on the public, commercial cinema..is doomed.

1977 Grimsby Evening Tel. 26 May 3/8 (advt.) Slot television, bargains galore.

1900 Jrnl. Inst. Electr. Engineers 29 802 A hole-winding produces a somewhat smoother pole than a slot-winding.

1968 D. G. Fink & J. M. Carroll Standard Handbk. Electr. Engineers (ed. 10) vi. 10 Fractional slot windings, where the number of slots per phase per pole is not an integer, have unequal coil groups.

1931 L. B. Turner Wireless xiv. 471 The calculation of E.M.F. in a slot-wound dynamo.

1563 N. Winȝet Wks. (S.T.S.) I. 139 Ȝour scoleris..hes in thare imaginatioun cloisit vp, slotit, and neidnalit the samin ȝettis of our hæretage.

1671 S. Skinner & T. Henshaw Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ To Slot a door, vox agro Linc. usitatissima, (i.e.) januam claudere.

1674 J. Ray N. Countrey Words in Coll. Eng. Words 43 To Slot a door, Lincoln, i.e. to shut it.

1787 F. Grose Provinc. Gloss. To slot a door, to shut it hastily, or in a passion.]

1811 H. Macneill Bygane Times 18 Whan they see The door, tho' slotted, budge a wee.

1695 W. Kennett Parochial Antiq. Gloss. at Slade In the South to slot a lock is to thrust it back.

1747 W. Hooson Miners Dict. sig. Qiij The Sliders are Slotted at both Ends to receive the Forks.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools Pl.J 2 This machine is intended to slot the sides of connecting rods.

1869 W. J. M. Rankine Cycl. Machine & Hand-tools Pl.J 4 The tool holder, X, is provided with a circular motion..for slotting out curves.

1892 D. A. Low Introd. Machine Drawing 54 After it is turned, planed, and bored it is slotted across.

1883 W. S. Gresley Gloss. Terms Coal Mining 227.

1928 Daily Express 9 Jan. 13 The unique collar slots through the buckle.

1940 H. G. Wells Babes in Darkling Wood i. i. 40 We are not the people we were yesterday. We slot into the new order.

1965 New Statesman 7 May 715/1 Personally I never knew yet quite what I was nor where I slotted in; I suppose I was ready for total identification somewhere, but never where I happened to be.

1966 ‘A. Hall’ 9th Directive xx. 187 I..watched the police-car slot in between us and the car ahead; then it pulled out and one lost it.

1971 Daily Tel. 9 June 2/4 Initially the trains will operate at a maximum 125 mph to ‘slot in’ with new-type conventional diesels.

1976 Times 15 Apr. 27/1 The French company augments its range in Britain with the GTL, which slots in between the 956cc TL and the high-performance TS.

1976 Ilkeston Advertiser 10 Dec. 19/1 They produced a great team display with new boy Henshaw slotting in well.

1980 S. Brett Dead Side of Mike xiii. 149 There are quite a few details which haven't slotted into position yet, but..the outline's right.

1966 A. Battersby Math. in Managem. viii. 211 Certain complex calculations..are available in a form which can be readily ‘slotted in’ to bigger programs.

1968 Listener 4 Jan. 27/1 The television slotting system..separates programmes into categories... But slotting also creates a climate in which surprise is unwelcome... Slotted into one of the arts programme times the Beatles' film would hardly have raised a whisper.

1970 O. Norton Dead on Prediction i. 14 I..managed to slot the Mini into the corner of the temporary car park.

1971 Country Life 8 Apr. 801/1 The richly Italianate facade of the Finsbury Bank for Savings..was slotted into the terrace in 1840.

1972 M. Williams Inside Number 10 xiii. 339 The National Agent went to great pains to slot this function into the election tour.

1973 Scotsman 13 Feb. 8/4 Steady progress up the scale leads to a salary of £3638. It is inconceivable that the Bishop of Bath and Wells..would be slotted in at the minimum.

1977 C. Dexter Silent World N. Quinn viii. 71 He slotted the book back into its shelf.

1977 Irish Times 8 June 8/4 Why, for instance, wasn't Sile de Valera slotted into this constituency once Vivion de Valera stood down?

1970 F. C. Avis Soccer Ref. Dict. (ed. 3) 86 Slot in, to pass, or to score a goal, by the very skilful placing of the ball through a narrow gap between players.

1974 Observer 1 Sept. 18/4 Boersma hardly needed to leave the ground to slot his..header into the net.

1975 Liverpool Echo (Football ed.) 1 Feb. 1/4 United took the lead through Jones who slotted home.

1975 Evening News (Edinb.) 15 Mar. (Sports Final ed.) 10/2 McDowell slotted the ball into the net.

1977 Wandsworth Borough News 7 Oct. 10/1 He beat Newton, centre-half Robinson and goalkeeper Stevenson before slotting the ball in.

1978 Cornish Guardian 27 Apr. 5/3 The home team were showing good touches and Hargreaves slotted in a third goal after Barker had sent a good shot screaming goalwards.