Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Slicing
Also called slicer, slice, CAM for additive
Turning a closed solid into the machine's actual instructions: intersecting the mesh with a stack of planes to get contours, filling each contour with shells, infill, and supports, and emitting the result as motion. Almost everything a print does is decided here rather than in the model.
In practice
The slicer is where a model stops being geometry and becomes a part, which is why the same STL on the same machine can come out two entirely different ways. When a print fails, suspect the profile before the geometry.