bottleneck

bottle +‎ neck

bottleneck (plural bottlenecks)

1. The narrow portion that forms the pouring spout of a bottle; the neck of a bottle.
2. In traffic, any narrowing of the road, especially resulting in a delay.
3. The part of a process that is too slow or cumbersome.

   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.

bottleneck (third-person singular simple present bottlenecks, present participle bottlenecking, simple past and past participle bottlenecked)

1. (transitive) To slow by causing a bottleneck.

   The merge bottlenecked the traffic every morning.

2. (intransitive) To form a bottleneck.

   The traffic bottlenecked at the merge every morning.

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