Meaning & use
bottle up
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Meanings
verbphrasal verb
To hold in strong feelings instead of showing or talking about them, often until they become harder to manage.
Grammar: Takes an object, and the object can come between the parts: bottle your anger up.
Patterns
- bottle up something
- bottle something up
Don't bottle up your worries; tell someone how you feel.
He bottled up his disappointment and smiled through dinner.
She had bottled everything up for years before she finally cried.
verbphrasal verb
To trap or block people, vehicles or forces in a limited space so that they cannot move out.
Grammar: Usually passive or used in military and traffic contexts.
Patterns
- bottle up something
- be bottled up in somewhere
The ships were bottled up in the harbor by the blockade.
A single broken-down bus bottled up traffic on the bridge.
Troops were bottled up in the valley for a week.
Word forms
| third person singular | bottles up |
|---|---|
| past tense | bottled up |
| past participle | bottled up |
| -ing form | bottling up |
Common combinations
- bottle up your feelings
- People who bottle up their feelings often feel worse later.
- bottle up anger
- He bottled up anger for months.
- bottle up emotions
- Try not to bottle up emotions during a stressful week.
- bottle up traffic
- Roadworks bottled up traffic for miles.
- bottle up resentment
- She had bottled up resentment since the argument.
Synonyms and how they differ
- suppress
- Suppress is more formal and can mean stopping any activity, not just feelings.
- repress
- Repress suggests pushing feelings out of awareness, often in a psychological sense.
- hold in
- Hold in is plainer and means the same thing for emotions, but is less vivid.
- keep inside
- Keep inside focuses on not speaking about the feeling, without the image of pressure building.
Opposites
Word family
- bottle noun
- a container for liquid
- bottled adjective
- stored in a bottle or held in
- bottleneck noun
- a narrow point that slows movement
Commonly confused: bottle up or bottle out?
bottle up vs bottle out
Bottle out is British slang for losing courage at the last moment and does not mean hiding feelings.
Practice
After the argument, Maria decided not to ___ her anger but to talk it through.
Choose one answer.
Bottle up means hold feelings in. The other combinations are not used for emotions, and bottle out means to lose courage.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “bottle up”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.