Memory leak?

ive seen the term "memory leak" alot, its sorta self explainitory but does anybody have an indepth explination? im just curious.
 
Memory leak in my personal glossary means ' memory is held by the system and not released when it should" or 'the app or system grabs more and more memory over time" Not very technical, but the system (or app) is just not controlling memory properly, probably lots of causes.
 
Applications (or processes) leak memory when they fail to de-allocate a block of memory when it is no longer needed. This memory is reserved for the application, but it has forgotten all about it. Thus the memory only gets released when the application is terminated. Memory leaks are the curse of embedded software. Try finding what is causing a 1K per week memory leak :)
 
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