bottle up

present singular third person bottles up · participle present bottling up · participle past bottled up · past bottled up

1. transitiveTo put into bottles.
2. transitiveTo prevent (enemy vessels) from leaving an anchorage.

   Paul Brunner spoke over his shoulder, "In the last war the cruiser Königsberg hid in an African river and made her repairs." / Kurt answered, "Yes, sir, but she didn't get out again. The Royal Navy bottled her up and finally destroyed her."

   1990, Alan Evans, Orphans of the Storm, London: Coronet Books, →ISBN, page 136

3. idiomatictransitiveTo keep suppressed and hidden.

   Emotions are often bottled up rather than dealt with, which can lead to stress in later life.

   3 more examples

   Pennsylvania gay activists were taken by surprise at the bill's assignment to the Labor Relations Committee. They had hoped to "bottle up" the bill in another House committee but an early poll of Labor Relations members indicates that attempts to stop the bill may now be more difficult.

   1975 December 27, “Anti-Gay Bill on the Move”, in Gay Community News, volume 3, number 26, page 3

   Those brave students who laid down their lives against the tanks of Tiananmen Square confirmed what I'd always believed: that no totalitarian society can bottle up the instinctive drive of men and women to be free, and that once you give a captive people a little freedom, they'll demand more.

   1990, Ronald Reagan, [Robert Lindsey], An American Life, New York, N.Y. […]: Pocket Books, →ISBN, page 373

   Young man in need of someone to share all this bottled up love with.

   1985 December 7, Merrill Symonds, “Personal advvertisement”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 21, page 12

4. informaltransitiveTo comprehensively defeat.

   Leosthenes defeated Antipater in battle—the first defeat of a Macedonian army for thirty years—and bottled him up in the town of Lamia.

   2011, Robin Waterfield, Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 39

5. slangtransitivehobbiesTo prevent (an opponent) from achieving any effective action.

   Darrion Trammell and San Diego State used a dominant defensive performance to knock top overall seed Alabama out of the NCAA Tournament on Friday night, bottling up All-America freshman Brandon Miller in a 71-64 victory in the Sweet 16.

   2023 March 25, “San Diego State ousts Alabama as all four No. 1 seeds fall short of Elite 8 for 1st time”, in CBC News, archived from the original on 08 Apr 2023

   1 more example

   Arguably the most important sequence of the game came with less than 30 seconds to play and the Nuggets clinging to a 90-89 lead. Butler drove to the rim but got bottled up in the post by Murray and Jokic then tried to find teammate Max Strus in the corner, but the ball was stolen by Nuggets swingman Kentavious Caldwell-Pope -- and the Heat were forced to foul.

   2013 June 13, Nick Friedell, “Spoelstra, Heat bow out with 'no regrets on our end'”, in ABC News, archived from the original on 14 Jun 2023