Word.ws English Dictionary

leaky

/ˈliːki/

leaky adjective: having leaks; not fully sealed.

Adjective

leaky (comparative leakier, superlative leakiest)

  1. Having leaks; not fully sealed.
    • The leaky bucket dripped only one drop at a time, but by the time I got back to the house it was half empty.
    • The ceiling was so leaky that someone had to fix it.
  2. Tending to leak secrets or information.
    • The spooks' argument against this is that the secret service would become leaky and demoralised […]1986, The Spectator, volume 257, numbers 8252-8268, page 6

leaky meaning in Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati

leaky in Hindi

रिसाव वाला

leaky in Malayalam

punctured, leaking, dripping
ചോരുന്ന, ചോർച്ചയുള്ള, വിള്ളലുള്ള, ഇറ്റുവീഴുന്ന, ഇറ്റിറ്റുവീഴുന്ന, പരിസ്രുത

leaky in Punjabi

ਲੀਕੀ

leaky in Gujarati

લીકી
More languagesFewer languages
leaky in Vietnamese
rò rỉ, rò, rỉ

Examples of leaky in a sentence

  • I used duct tape to cover the hole in a leaky pipe.
  • Lying in bed, I could hear drippings from the leaky roof.
  • Between the leaky taps and the peeling wallpaper, there isn't much about this house to appeal to a buyer.

All 19 example sentences with leaky

Forms of leaky

comparativeleakier
superlativeleakiest

Origin of leaky

Likely a normalisation ( + -y) of earlier leak, leake, leke (“leaky”, adjective), from Middle English leke (“leaky”), from Old English hlec, *lec (“having cracks or rents; leaky”), from Proto-Germanic *lekaz (“leaking; leaky”). By surface analysis, leak + -y. Cognate with Scots lek, leck (“leaky”), Saterland Frisian läk (“leaky”), Dutch lek (“leaky”), German Low German leck (“leaky”), German leck (“leaky”), Swedish läck (“leaky”), Icelandic lekur (“leaky”).

Words formed from leaky

Phrases with leaky

Words that rhyme with leaky

11 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about leaky

What does leaky mean?
Leaky means having leaks; not fully sealed.
What is leaky in Hindi?
Leaky in Hindi is रिसाव वाला. See Leaky meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is leaky?
Leaky is an adjective.
How do you pronounce leaky?
Leaky is pronounced /ˈliːki/.

Words near leaky in the dictionary

  1. leaks like a sieve
  2. leaks out
  3. leaktivism
  4. leaktivist
  5. leaktivists
  6. leaky
  7. leaky abstraction
  8. leaky abstractions
  9. leaky brain syndrome
  10. leaky brain syndromes
  11. leaky bucket

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: leaky (page history and authors); leaky (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); leaky (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); leaky (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); leaky (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-leaky.wav.

Cite this entry: “leaky.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/leaky. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.