the.com/memory leak

means A memory leak is a bug where a program keeps claiming chunks of memory for data it no longer needs and never releases them, so memory use creeps upward until things slow down or crash.

from 'Leak' is borrowed from plumbing — a slow, unnoticed loss of something that should be contained. The metaphor crossed into computing in the mid-20th century as programmers grappled with early operating systems' dynamic memory allocation: a 'leak' wasn't memory vanishing into nowhere, but memory quietly becoming unreachable and unreclaimable, like water seeping out through a crack rather than flowing to where it's needed. The term stuck because the behavior matches so well — nothing dramatic happens at first, just a slow, invisible drain until the system runs dry.