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
Felicia Jackson, Forbes.com, 23 June 2025
Oil shock—or maybe not Iran has the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, the bottleneck shipping channel in the Persian Gulf through which 20% of all the world’s oil moves.
—Diane Brady, Fortune, 23 June 2025
Harry Booth, Time, 22 June 2025
The tea wholesalers oversee another part of the process, too, where a third bottleneck is bottlenecking: packing.
—HubSpot, 20 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for bottleneck
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Noun
These bottlenecks are not down to a lack of ambition but rather structural weaknesses, including lack of regulatory certainty, underdeveloped infrastructure, and crucially a lack of offtake agreements to guarantee long-term market demand.
—Felicia Jackson, Forbes.com, 23 June 2025
Oil shock—or maybe not Iran has the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, the bottleneck shipping channel in the Persian Gulf through which 20% of all the world’s oil moves.
—Diane Brady, Fortune, 23 June 2025
Verb
Compute and algorithms were also bottlenecked, but data was sort of right there with them.
—Harry Booth, Time, 22 June 2025
The tea wholesalers oversee another part of the process, too, where a third bottleneck is bottlenecking: packing.
—HubSpot, 20 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 27 Jun. 2025.
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