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
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
Verne Kopytoff, Fortune, 5 July 2025
Entrepreneurs can adopt this approach by eliminating bottlenecks, empowering teams to make independent decisions, and prioritizing outcomes over the number of hours worked.
—Sarah Hernholm, Forbes.com, 4 July 2025
Stephanie Krikorian, Curbed, 23 June 2025
Mimoun, who works in digital security, said his group eventually merged with other demonstrators and wound up bottlenecked by LAPD near the intersection of Temple and Alameda streets, where a stalemate with LAPD officers ensued.
—Libor Jany, Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for bottleneck
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Noun
As production ramped up, process engineers, who sometimes patrolled the assembly line with stopwatches, looked for bottlenecks and rejiggered the assembly line.
—Verne Kopytoff, Fortune, 5 July 2025
Entrepreneurs can adopt this approach by eliminating bottlenecks, empowering teams to make independent decisions, and prioritizing outcomes over the number of hours worked.
—Sarah Hernholm, Forbes.com, 4 July 2025
Verb
Tory Burch, Brooke Shields, Leon Black, Michael Bloomberg, Wilbur Ross, and Howard Stern.
Noteworthy for being the point at which Eastbound traffic gets bottlenecked on a summer Friday where Route 27 crosses Mill Creek.
—Stephanie Krikorian, Curbed, 23 June 2025
Mimoun, who works in digital security, said his group eventually merged with other demonstrators and wound up bottlenecked by LAPD near the intersection of Temple and Alameda streets, where a stalemate with LAPD officers ensued.
—Libor Jany, Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for bottleneck
Cite this Entry
“Bottleneck.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottleneck. Accessed 11 Jul. 2025.
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