bottleneck

1 of 3

adjective

bot·​tle·​neck ˈbä-tᵊl-ˌnek 

: narrow

bottleneck harbors

bottleneck

2 of 3

noun

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

bottleneck

3 of 3

verb

bottlenecked; bottlenecking; bottlenecks

transitive verb

: to slow or halt by causing a bottleneck

Synonyms

Noun

• backup
• jam
• jam-up
• logjam
• snarl
• tailback [British]
• tie-up

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

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

For example, if customer support is a bottleneck, LLMs can automate common inquiries, freeing up human agents to handle complex issues. —Abhishek Shivanna, Forbes, 5 Nov. 2024

There is no bottleneck in production, but rather a glut of supply worldwide. —David Faris, Newsweek, 4 Nov. 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

Word History

First Known Use

Adjective

1854, in the meaning defined above

Noun

1850, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Verb

1919, in the meaning defined above

Phrases Containing bottleneck

• bottleneck guitar

Kids Definition

bottleneck

noun

bot·​tle·​neck

ˈbät-ᵊl-ˌnek

1

: a narrow passageway

2

: someone or something that holds up progress

a traffic bottleneck