“Leak” is one of those technical words we often forget to explain.
A leak refers to something that consumes some resource in a way that you can’t get it back, like water leaking out of a hole in a bucket and falling onto the ground.
Regarding a memory leak, it’s natural to ask “Where does the memory go?” There’s no good answer to that question, because the analogy just doesn’t extend that far.
Memory is a sort of renewable resource. We use some of it every time we make a thunk, and it gets released when we’re done with it. You take a little water out of the bucket, use it for a while, then the garbage collector puts it back.
If your program is accidentally written such that it continues to hold references to things it doesn’t need anymore, then those things don’t get garbage collected, and you continually consume more and more memory.
Or in other words — if you look at it from the perspective that you only have a finite amount of memory in your computer — you continually lose memory. More precisely, you lose available memory — free space in which to make more thunks and whatnot. If that program runs long enough, this bucket will eventually end up empty.
We also talk about leaking other resources, like file handles. The OS keeps track of all the files that all the processes have open, and there’s only some finite number of files your OS can keep open at one time. This is in part because keeping a file open requires keeping some information about it in memory, so in some sense a file handle leak is just another kind of memory leak.
So don’t take the “leaking” metaphor too seriously; it just refers to anything that unnecessarily causes the dwindling availability of some limited resource.