bottleneck
/ˈbɒt(ə)lnɛk
/noun
1The neck or mouth of a bottle.
2A narrow section of road or a junction that impedes traffic flow: the bottleneck on Talbot Road...
- The mayor said that this section of road was a well-known bottleneck that funneled traffic from four lanes into three lanes.
- ‘York Corporation today announced a plan to close many of the city's major road bottlenecks to traffic, except for access,’ the report began.
- The proposed subway is envisaged to clear the traffic bottleneck at this busy junction.
Synonyms
traffic jam, jam, congestion, hold-up, gridlock, queue, tailback;
constriction, narrowing, restriction, obstruction, block, blockage, stoppage
informal snarl-up
2.1A situation that causes delay in a process or system: animated films are still stymied by a technological bottleneck...
- The review should also address the bottlenecks in the planning system that are causing unnecessary delays and costs to the construction sector, the CIF said.
- In a pull system, the bottleneck governs the rate that patients flow through the whole process.
- Mr Speaker, the first order of business for this government is to fully investigate this situation and remove the bottlenecks that have robbed the economy of the full benefits of these projects.
3A device shaped like the neck of a bottle that is worn on a guitarist’s finger and used to produce sliding effects on the strings: [mass noun]: I started using bottleneck on the guitar...
- He uses shadowy ghostings of pedal steel or slide blues tonality, though there are no bottlenecks in sight.
- There's fast blues and slow blues, and major blues and minor blues, and the kind of blues you play with a bottleneck and the strings already tuned to a chord.
- When Fred sat down with his guitar and a bottleneck, everyone joined in.
3.1 (also bottleneck guitar) [mass noun] The style of playing that uses a bottleneck: it is the perfect instrument for playing bottleneck...
- Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and '90s, the substance and content was an unmistakable African retention
- No Hero's bottleneck guitar screeches and wails in tandem.
- Acoustic bottleneck guitar, oblique keyboard phrases, electric licks distilled from Lynyrd Skynyrd, galvanised British 1960s psychedelia, and hooks stronger than Tyson on the comeback trail combine to create a glorious album.