bottleneck

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,493 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: bottlenecks

A bottleneck is the point where a process is slowed by one stage. A production bottleneck, a bottleneck at the junction, remove the bottleneck.

The insight the word carries is that a system is only as fast as its slowest step, so improving anything else changes nothing. Finding it is most of the work, since the bottleneck is rarely where the queue is longest.

Definitions of bottleneck

1nounbottleneckThe point where a process is slowed by one stage.B2+
“The only bottleneck in the factory is the old packing machine, which slows everything down.”

bottleneck is a constraint.

Where it comes from

From bottle + neck.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Factory & Manufacturing

Practise this word

bottleneck in the wild

The genetic drift caused by a population bottleneck can change the proportional random distribution of alleles and even lead to loss of alleles.
Population bottleneck
Population bottlenecks play an important role in conservation biology (see minimum viable population size) and in the context of agriculture (biological and pest control).
Population bottleneck
The information bottleneck method is a technique in information theory introduced by Naftali Tishby, Fernando C.
Information bottleneck method
In engineering, a bottleneck is a phenomenon by which the performance or capacity of an entire system is severely limited by a single component.
Bottleneck (engineering)
The component is sometimes called a bottleneck point.
Bottleneck (engineering)

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

← Vocabulary