English Lesson — Monday Morning: Throttling & Rate Limiting Vocabulary

Monday morning, technical slot. Today’s theme: what happens when a client sends too many requests — and the English you need to talk about it in a standup, a design doc, or a postmortem.

Word of the Day: Throttle

Word: throttle (verb, also used as a noun: “a throttle”)
IPA: UK /ˈθrɒt.əl/ · US /ˈθrɑː.t̬əl/
Vietnamese meaning: hãm bớt / giới hạn tốc độ — chủ động làm chậm hoặc giới hạn số lượng request để tránh hệ thống bị quá tải

3 example sentences:

• “We throttle requests to 100 per minute per API key so one noisy client can’t take down the whole service.”
• “If traffic spikes during the flash sale, the gateway will throttle non-premium users first.”
• “Our app retries silently, so when the backend throttles it, users just see a slightly slower screen instead of an error.”

🔊 Listen and practice: Cambridge Dictionary — throttle | YouGlish — real videos using “throttle”

Vocabulary Table

Phrase	Vietnamese	Example
rate limit	giới hạn tốc độ	“The API has a rate limit of 1,000 requests per hour.”
429 Too Many Requests	lỗi “quá nhiều yêu cầu”	“The client got a 429 after exceeding its quota.”
(exponential) backoff	thời gian chờ tăng dần trước khi thử lại	“The SDK uses exponential backoff before retrying a throttled request.”
burst limit	giới hạn lưu lượng tức thời	“The bucket allows a burst limit of 20 requests before throttling kicks in.”
quota	hạn mức	“Each tenant gets a daily quota of 10,000 API calls.”

How Throttling Actually Works

Most APIs throttle using a “token bucket”: the bucket holds a limited number of tokens, tokens refill at a steady rate, and every request costs one token. No tokens left means the request gets throttled.

Pronunciation Guide

throttle — 2 syllables: THROT-tle

• /θ/ — tongue between teeth, like “think”
• /r/ — like “run”
• /ɒ/ (UK) or /ɑː/ (US) — open “o” sound, like “sock” or “father”
• /t/ — crisp “t”, like “town”
• /əl/ — soft schwa + “l”, like the ending of “label”

Practice sentence — read aloud 3 times:

“The gateway will throttle your requests once you cross the rate limit.”

Exercise 1: Fill in the Blank

If a client sends too many requests in a short time, the API will ______ them until the quota resets.

Show answer

throttle — “…the API will throttle them until the quota resets.”

Exercise 2: Translate

Translate into English: “Chúng tôi phải giới hạn tốc độ API vì server bị quá tải vào giờ cao điểm.”

Show answer

“We had to throttle the API because the server was overloaded during peak hours.”

Idiom of the Day: “Put the Brakes On”

Vietnamese meaning: phanh lại / làm chậm hoặc tạm dừng một việc đang diễn ra quá nhanh

• “Management decided to put the brakes on the feature rollout until the rate-limiting bug was fixed.”
• “We had to put the brakes on hiring this quarter.”

Recommended Watching

• ByteByteGo — “Rate Limiting Fundamentals” by Alex Xu: a short, visual breakdown of why and how systems throttle traffic.
• “What is Rate Limiting / API Throttling?”: a plain-English explainer aimed at developers new to the concept.
• YouGlish — “throttle”: real video clips of native speakers using the word in context.

Daily Challenge

Open the rate-limit docs for one API you actually use (GitHub, Stripe, OpenAI — pick one). Find the real number (requests per minute/hour). Then say one sentence out loud describing it, using “throttle” or “rate limit.” For example: “GitHub’s API throttles unauthenticated requests to 60 per hour.”