bottle up

phrasal verb

bottled up; bottling up; bottles up
: to keep (a feeling or emotion) inside instead of expressing it : to hide (a feeling or emotion)
She's kept her feelings about the accident bottled up for too long.
I know he's angry, but he bottles it up inside instead of talking to someone about it.

Examples of bottle up in a Sentence

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Chicago has speed bottled up by now. Joel Lorenzi, New York Times, 7 Oct. 2025 Perhaps counterintuitively, a strong polar vortex actually keeps coldest weather bottled up near the North Pole. Doyle Rice, USA Today, 4 Oct. 2025 With the sudden collapse of the Japanese empire, hopes, visions, and fractures that had been bottled up for nearly forty years erupted into Korea’s Asian Spring. Kornel Chang september 19, Literary Hub, 19 Sep. 2025 RaShawnda says that her grandmother, who passed away from cancer in 2014, bottled up a lot of her grief. Georgina Dinardo, NBC news, 14 Sep. 2025 See All Example Sentences for bottle up

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Cite this Entry

“Bottle up.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottle%20up. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

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