plural bottlenecks
1
a
: a narrow route
b
: a point of traffic congestion
2
a
: someone or something that slows or halts free movement and progress
working to streamline production and eliminate bottlenecks
b
: impasse
They reached a bottleneck in the negotiations.
c
: a dramatic reduction in the size of a population (as of a species) that results in a decrease in genetic variation
3
or bottleneck guitar
: a style of guitar playing in which glissando effects are produced by sliding an object (such as a knife blade or the neck of a bottle) along the strings
bottlenecked; bottlenecking; bottlenecks
: to slow or halt by causing a bottleneck
Synonyms
Examples of bottleneck in a Sentence
Noun
Bridge construction has created a bottleneck on the southern part of Main Street.
All decisions must be approved by the committee, and this is where the company runs into bottlenecks.
Recent Examples on the Web
Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 20 May 2013
To compare pre- and post-bottleneck genetic diversity, the researchers sequenced DNA from 1,000-year-old penguin bones on the island.
—Sarah Zhang, Discover Magazine, 22 Feb. 2012
Aditya Ganjam, Forbes, 1 Nov. 2024
Ongoing efforts to relieve congestion at a notorious bottleneck in Surprise will get a $4 million boost in Maricopa County transportation funding.
—Arizona Republic, The Arizona Republic, 26 Oct. 2024
Andrea Castillo, Los Angeles Times, 5 June 2024
The push to build more computationally intense AI systems could be bottlenecked by the intense energy requirements of the largest clusters of semiconductor chips or by a lack of training data.
—Will Henshall, TIME, 3 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for bottleneck 
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Adjective
The impact of the pre-bottleneck period is attenuated, because much of the population was simply not genetically sampled.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 20 May 2013
To compare pre- and post-bottleneck genetic diversity, the researchers sequenced DNA from 1,000-year-old penguin bones on the island.
—Sarah Zhang, Discover Magazine, 22 Feb. 2012
Noun
The checkout process can become a major bottleneck as thousands of customers attempt to complete purchases at the same time, pushing payment and order processing systems to their limits.
—Aditya Ganjam, Forbes, 1 Nov. 2024
Ongoing efforts to relieve congestion at a notorious bottleneck in Surprise will get a $4 million boost in Maricopa County transportation funding.
—Arizona Republic, The Arizona Republic, 26 Oct. 2024
Verb
In Tijuana, Jose Garcia Lara, director of the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter, worries the executive order could cause a crisis as migrants become bottlenecked in northern Mexico.
—Andrea Castillo, Los Angeles Times, 5 June 2024
The push to build more computationally intense AI systems could be bottlenecked by the intense energy requirements of the largest clusters of semiconductor chips or by a lack of training data.
—Will Henshall, TIME, 3 June 2024
See all Example Sentences for bottleneck
Dictionary Entries Near bottleneck
Cite this Entry
“Bottleneck.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottleneck. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
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