Signals and slots are a way of decoupling a sender (the signal) and zero or more receivers (the slots). Let's say you a system which has events that you want to make available to any other part of the system interested in those events. Rather than hard-wiring the code that generates event to the code that wants to know about those events, you would use a signals and slots pattern.
When the sender signals an event (usually by calling the function associated with that event/signal) all the receivers for that event are automatically called. This allows you to connect and disconnect receivers as necessary during the lifetime of the program.
Since this question was tagged C++, here is a link to the Boost.Signals library which has a much more thorough explanation.
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