bottleneck

1 of 3

adjective

bot·​tle·​neck ˈbä-tᵊl-ˌnek How to pronounce bottleneck (audio)
: 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

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
This reliance on APIs makes applications vulnerable to external disruptions, requiring engineering leaders to act as traffic controllers, meticulously tracking data flow, managing costs, preventing bottlenecks and addressing security concerns to protect sensitive data. Eyal Solomon, Forbes, 19 Sep. 2024 But Víctor Moreno Mayar, an evolutionary geneticist at the Globe Institute of the University of Copenhagen, realized ancient DNA from the islanders could provide more direct evidence of past population bottlenecks. Byrodrigo Pérez Ortega, science.org, 11 Sep. 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 

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bottleneck.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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

Time Traveler
The first known use of bottleneck was in 1850

Dictionary Entries Near bottleneck

Cite this Entry

“Bottleneck.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottleneck. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

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

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