Meaning & use
bottleneck
Last updated
A point of congestion that slows down or limits the flow of a process, traffic, or system.
See it in a sentence
The single checkout lane created a bottleneck during the lunch rush.
Slow approval from management became the biggest bottleneck in the project.
A note on using this word
Originally a literal reference to a bottle's narrow neck restricting flow, the word is now used mainly in figurative business, traffic, and computing contexts.
Words with a similar meaning
holdupobstruction
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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