It depends on how strictly you define "memory leak." I'm currently in the process of diagnosing a problem that causes steadily increasing memory consumption in one of our servers. Odds are that we are simply keeping a bunch of data around past the time when it should be detected as stale and expunged. If that's true, we still have pointers to the objects and know exactly where and what they are, so the memory has not been "leaked" by the strict definition that we are no longer able to access or deallocate it. Still, pending diagnosis, everyone refers to it as the "memory leak," technical and nontechnical people alike. Usually there is a lot of discussion of such a bug before the cause is detected and not so much afterwards, so there would not be much opportunity to use the term "memory leak" if it was only used postmortem. (Not to mention that true memory leaks are pretty rare nowadays except for those unfortunate enough to be programming in C.)