Dictionaries › English

leak

Pronunciation: /liːk/

The English word “leak” has 16 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A crack, crevice, fissure, or hole which admits water or other fluid, or lets it escape.
  2. The entrance or escape of a fluid through a crack, fissure, or other aperture.
  3. A divulgation, or disclosure, of information previously held secret.
  4. The person through whom such divulgation, or disclosure, occurs.
  5. A loss of electricity through imperfect insulation, or the point where it occurs.
  6. The gradual loss of a system resource caused by failure to deallocate previously reserved portions.
  7. An act of urination.

verb

  1. To allow fluid or gas to pass through an opening that should be sealed.
  2. (of a fluid or gas) To pass through an opening that should be sealed.
  3. To disclose secret information surreptitiously or anonymously.
  4. To pass through when it would normally or preferably be blocked.
  5. To allow anything through that would normally or preferably be blocked.
  6. To urinate.
  7. To bleed.
  8. To ejaculate.

adjective

  1. Leaky.

Etymology

From Middle English leken (“to let water in or out”), from Old English *lecan (“to leak”), Middle Dutch leken (“to leak, drip”) or Old Norse leka (“to leak, drip”); all from Proto-Germanic *lekaną (“to leak, drain”), from Proto-Indo-European *leg- (“to leak”). Cognate with Dutch lekken (“to leak”), German lechen, lecken (“to leak”), Danish lække (“to leak”), Swedish läcka (“to leak”), Norwegian…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “leak” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.