From that you can say that spot colours are essentially any non-standard printing ink.
Use of spot colour is usually when something needs to be printed that can not be printed with any of the standard four inks. Other issues to affect the use of spot colour could be price.
Usually spot colours are individually mixed coloured inks which makes them a much flatter texture on the page because the printer doesn't need to mix any colours together on the page to create it.
Spot colour can also be used for varnishes and for metallic colours.
If you assume that every colour needs it's own lithographic plate in a printing job and your design only uses two colours then it would be much more efficient to use spot colours of the two colours. This would only require two plates to be made instead of the four for CMYK.
Accuracy is also an issue, as in the example above then it would be certain that the colour is exactly what was needed which can't be done easily using CMYK.
There are individual spot colour specification companies for use in printing. The standard spot colour classification system in the UK is the Pantone system.
The company have basically identified all these different spot colours and organised and uniquely classified them each with a code. This means that a specific colour can be really easily described.
One issue that designers will always have is that computer screens all vary in quality and brightness and contrast so what you see on screen could print out completely differently.
Pantone fixes this problem with the pantone books as shown above because you can find the colour that you want in the book and then use its reference number in any adobe program to get that exact colour when printed no matter what it looks like on screen.
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