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

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

Fragmented infrastructure can delay deployment, inflate costs and bottleneck the flow of insights, rendering agentic AI ineffective or incomplete. —Sahar Hashmi, Forbes.com, 1 June 2025

Many decisions at the CDC are now bottlenecked for HHS approvals, multiple officials said. —Nicole Brown Chau, CBS News, 7 May 2025

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

Rhymes for bottleneck

• biotech
• quarterdeck
• turtleneck
• zapotec
• aztec
• breakneck
• codec
• exec
• mixtec
• paycheck
• pinchbeck
• recheck

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