bottle up

verb bottles up · bottling up · bottled up

1. transitive To put into bottles.
2. transitive To 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."
3. idiomatic, transitive To keep suppressed and hidden. Emotions are often bottled up rather than dealt with, which can lead to stress in later life.
4. informal, transitive To 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.
5. slang, transitive To 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.