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
Synonyms
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
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
See all Example Sentences for bottleneck 
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
See all Example Sentences for bottleneck
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Dictionary Entries Near bottleneck
Cite this Entry
“Bottleneck.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottleneck. Accessed 5 May. 2024.
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