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
Srikrishna Jayaram, Forbes.com, 29 July 2025
Wall Street had little doubt that Brian Niccol was the right executive to fix Starbucks’ triple shot of trouble: downbeat sales, operational bottlenecks and a fading coffee house identity.
—Paulina Likos, CNBC, 28 July 2025
Don Muir, Forbes.com, 18 July 2025
It’s also recommended to go with one that has solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, as a traditional hard drive will greatly bottleneck the performance of the rest of the components.
—Bestreviews, Mercury News, 9 July 2025
See All Example Sentences for bottleneck
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.
Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Noun
Today, those static methods struggle to keep pace with a world shaped by global bottlenecks, variable MOQs (minimum order quantities), tariff wars, unpredictable lead times and more.
—Srikrishna Jayaram, Forbes.com, 29 July 2025
Wall Street had little doubt that Brian Niccol was the right executive to fix Starbucks’ triple shot of trouble: downbeat sales, operational bottlenecks and a fading coffee house identity.
—Paulina Likos, CNBC, 28 July 2025
Verb
Private markets are sitting on trillions in dry powder—but they’re bottlenecked by brittle workflows, disconnected systems, and diligence cycles stuck in 2012.
—Don Muir, Forbes.com, 18 July 2025
It’s also recommended to go with one that has solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, as a traditional hard drive will greatly bottleneck the performance of the rest of the components.
—Bestreviews, Mercury News, 9 July 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 2 Aug. 2025.
Copy CitationLove words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share