bottleneck.
The narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
Meaning & usage
The narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
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.
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.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰeHw-der. Ancient Greekbor.? Latin buttis Proto-Indo-European *-lós Proto-Indo-European *-elós Proto-Italic *-elos Proto-Italic *-kelos Latin -culus Late Latin butticula Old French boteillebor. Middle English botel English bottle Proto-Germanic *hnakkô Proto-West Germanic *hnakkō Old English hnecca Middle English nekke English neck English bottleneck From bottle + neck.
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.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰeHw-der. Ancient Greekbor.? Latin buttis Proto-Indo-European *-lós Proto-Indo-European *-elós Proto-Italic *-elos Proto-Italic *-kelos Latin -culus Late Latin butticula Old French boteillebor. Middle English botel English bottle Proto-Germanic *hnakkô Proto-West Germanic *hnakkō Old English hnecca Middle English nekke English neck English bottleneck From bottle + neck.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.