bottleneck

CEFRC1

/bˈɑtəˌlnɛk/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
noun
A point where progress or traffic becomes restricted.
02
noun
Extra detail
In traffic, any narrowing of the road, especially resulting in a delay.

Examples

Ashkenazi Jews experienced a population bottleneck around 700 years ago.
The shortage of engineers is the greatest bottleneck to the development of our company.

At a glance

Sits at C1 on the CEFR scale

Deep Dive

Extra meanings

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.
The part of a process that is too slow or cumbersome.

In context

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.
The merge bottlenecked the traffic every morning.

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

The word in print, with each source given in full.

"Permissive" working allows more than one train to be in a block section at one time but trains must be run at low speed in order to stop on sight behind the train in front. Such working is often authorised to allow freight trains to "bunch" together to await a path through a bottleneck instead of being strung out over several block sections, as would be necessary if absolute working were in force.
1962 October, “Talking of Trains: The collisions at Connington”, in Modern Railways, page 232
At one time, Reading was regarded as a notorious bottleneck in the rail network, almost incapable of managing the number of services that needed to pass through the station each day. [...] A road widening scheme at Cow Lane has also allowed two-way traffic to run beneath the railway for the first time, helping to remove a notorious road traffic bottleneck in the town.
2020 December 2, Andy Coward, “New-look Reading is willing and able”, in Rail, pages 58, 59

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From bottle + neck.