| 1. | an unintended hole, crack, or the like, through which liquid, gas, light, etc., enters or escapes: a leak in the roof. |
| 2. | an act or instance of leaking. |
| 3. | any means of unintended entrance or escape. |
| 4. | Electricity. the loss of current from a conductor, usually resulting from poor insulation. |
| 5. | a disclosure of secret, esp. official, information, as to the news media, by an unnamed source. |
| 6. | to let a liquid, gas, light, etc., enter or escape, as through an unintended hole or crack: The boat leaks. |
| 7. | to pass in or out in this manner, as liquid, gas, or light: gas leaking from a pipe. |
| 8. | to become known unintentionally (usually fol. by out): The news leaked out. |
| 9. | to disclose secret, esp. official, information anonymously, as to the news media: The official revealed that he had leaked to the press in the hope of saving his own reputation. |
| 10. | to let (liquid, gas, light, etc.) enter or escape: This camera leaks light. |
| 11. | to allow to become known, as information given out covertly: to leak the news of the ambassador's visit. |
| 12. | take a leak, Slang: Vulgar. to urinate. |

"Why, you will allow vs ne're a Iourden, and then we leake in your Chimney." ["I Hen. IV," II.i.22]
leak programming
With a qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in.
One might refer to, say, a "window handle leak" in a window system.
See memory leak, fd leak.
[The Jargon File]
(1995-04-18)