Glossary
A working glossary of casino and slot machine terms
We keep this list short and plain. Each entry gives one fact worth remembering, not a dictionary paraphrase. Where a term deserves the longer story, we send you to the guide.
A to H
BAR symbol
That pared-back bar symbol found on today's reels traces back to the Bell-Fruit Gum Company. In places where paying cash was illegal, the earliest machines dispensed goods rather than coin — which is why fruit symbols and the gum firm's mark lingered on the glass well past the point the rule was lifted.
Casino
It derives from 'casino' in Italian, the diminutive form of 'casa' — a little house, taken literally. Among 18th-century Venetians, a casino meant a small private apartment used for socialising; only afterward did the gambling sense attach to it.
Electromechanical
A machine with electrically driven reels and mechanical stops, sitting between the hand-pulled original and the fully video machine. Bally's Money Honey, launched in 1963, was the first complete example.
Fruit machine
The British name for the slot machine, describing the same fruit symbols explained under BAR symbol. See route: glossary — house edge, below, for how the odds behind those symbols actually work.
Hopper
Inside the cabinet sat the coin reservoir. On Money Honey this hopper was 'bottomless' — a single win could dispense as many as 500 coins, with no attendant needed to reload it by hand.
House edge
The share of every wager the operator expects to keep over many plays, built into the paytable rather than added afterwards. It is a long-run average, not a promise about any one spin.
L to V
Liberty Bell
Built in San Francisco by Charles Fey in 1895, the machine carried three reels that spun beneath five symbols — hearts, horseshoes, diamonds, spades, and of course the bell. No patent was ever filed by Fey, and that is partly why the three-reel design caught on so quickly.
One-armed bandit
That side lever is where the nickname comes from. Long after electric motors rendered it mechanically pointless, makers left it on the cabinets for decades — players still expected something to pull.
Payline
The line across the reels that must show a matching set of symbols to pay out. Mechanical reels could only carry so many stops; once the reel became a video image, designers could stack dozens of paylines onto one screen.
Pokies
The Australian and New Zealand term for slot machines, short for 'poker machine' — a name that outlasted the poker-card symbols it originally described.
Reel
The spinning drum carrying the symbols. A physical drum can only hold so many stops, which capped how many combinations a mechanical machine could ever offer — a limit removed only when the reel became a screen.
Ridotto
Housed within the Palazzo Dandolo and converted at the city's own instigation, it opened in Venice in 1638 — the first gambling house that was public and state-sanctioned anywhere in the West. Why the authorities chose to step in is told more fully in the guide.
Slot machine
The general American term, named for the coin slot rather than for any game mechanic. It covers everything from Fey's hand-pulled cabinet to the video screens that replaced it.
Video slot
The Fortune Coin Company built the first one in 1976, running on a 19-inch Sony television modified for gameplay, installed on the floor of a Las Vegas hotel-casino. The screen, not the reel, is what let modern multi-line games exist at all.