bottleneck
bottleneck noun: the narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
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Noun
bottleneck (plural bottlenecks)
- The narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
- A portion of a bottleneck placed on the finger and used as a guitar slide.
- In traffic, any narrowing of the road, especially resulting in a delay.
- "Permissive" working allows more than one train to be in a block section at one time but trains must be run at low speed in order to stop on sight behind the train in front. Such working is often authorised to allow freight trains to "bunch" together to await a path through a bottleneck instead of...1962 October, “Talking of Trains: The collisions at Connington”, in Modern Railways, page 232
- At one time, Reading was regarded as a notorious bottleneck in the rail network, almost incapable of managing the number of services that needed to pass through the station each day. [...]
- A road widening scheme at Cow Lane has also allowed two-way traffic to run beneath the railway for the first time, helping to remove a notorious road traffic bottleneck in the town.2020 December 2, Andy Coward, “New-look Reading is willing and able”, in Rail, pages 58, 59
- Synonyms:
- chokepoint
- The part of a process that is too slow or cumbersome due to the lessening of available throughput.
- It is easy to create entries; processing the paperwork is the bottleneck.
- The bottleneck in this computer program is the inefficient sorting process; we should replace it with a faster one.
Verb
bottleneck (third-person singular simple present bottlenecks, present participle bottlenecking, simple past and past participle bottlenecked)
- To slow by causing a bottleneck.
- The merge bottlenecked the traffic every morning.
- To form a bottleneck.
- The traffic bottlenecked at the merge every morning.
bottleneck meaning in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Tagalog
bottleneck in Tamil
- நெருக்கடியான நிலை, முட்டுக்கட்டை, முட்டுப்பாடு, நெரிசல் இடர்பாடு
bottleneck in Malayalam
- congestion, traffic jam, jam
- കുപ്പിക്കഴുത്ത്, ദുർഘടാവസ്ഥ, ഗതാഗതസ്തംഭനം, സ്തംഭനം, ഇടുക്കം, ഗതിസ്തംഭനം
bottleneck in Kannada
- ಇಕ್ಕಟ್ಟು, ಇರ್ಕಟ್ಟು, ಇರ್ಕಟ, ಅಡಚಣೆ, ಇರುಕಲು, ಅಡ್ಡಿ
bottleneck in Tagalog
- narrowing of the road, especially resulting in a delay
- salangkipot, pagsisikip
More languagesFewer languages
- bottleneck in Arabic
- عُنُق الزُّجَاجَة ʕunuq az-zujāja
- bottleneck in Malay
- cerutan, kejejalan
- bottleneck in Persian
- گلوگاه galugâh
Examples of bottleneck in a sentence
- The real bottleneck now, Ritchie argues, isn’t technology so much as belief.
- Water shortage has become a bottleneck for the economic development of Dunhuang, Gansu Province.
- To handle the unceasing traffic increase, immense sums of money are being expended in dealing with bottlenecks.
Synonyms of bottleneck
Forms of bottleneck
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | bottlenecks |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | bottlenecks |
| present participle | bottlenecking |
| past participle | bottlenecked |
| past | bottlenecked |
Origin of bottleneck
From bottle + neck.
Words formed from bottleneck
Phrases with bottleneck
Questions about bottleneck
- What does bottleneck mean?
- Bottleneck means the narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
- What is bottleneck in Tamil?
- Bottleneck in Tamil is நெருக்கடியான நிலை, முட்டுக்கட்டை, முட்டுப்பாடு. See Bottleneck meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is bottleneck?
- Bottleneck can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of bottleneck?
- The plural of bottleneck is bottlenecks.
Words near bottleneck in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bottleneck (page history and authors); bottleneck (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); bottleneck (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); bottleneck (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vininn126-bottleneck.wav.
Cite this entry: “bottleneck.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bottleneck. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.