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Quiet period before a transmission. If a station has a slot, it will stay quiet for that period of time before it tries to transmit.

Slots are used as part of the random backoff time. The random backoff time is where the station chooses a random number of slots and counts them down. When their number of slots hits zero, they send data.

For example, an OFDM slot is 9 microseconds. If the station chooses 8 slots as their random backoff time, they will countdown 72 microseconds before sending data.

The way I learned this stuff was from the CWAP instructor-led class. I was lucky enough to have Devin Akin as my instructor (it was a train-the-trainer) and he explained slots very well. When you see a diagram of slot times in the CWAP class and the instructor explains them properly, you'll begin to understand.