Word.ws English Dictionary

leaky abstraction

leaky abstraction noun: an abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.

Noun

leaky abstraction (plural leaky abstractions)

  1. An abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.
    • This is a classic case of leaky abstraction. Repository is supposed to abstract away any concerns around querying the database, but now what we are doing here is returning an IQueryable<T> to the consuming code and asking it to build the queries, thus leaking the abstraction that is supposed to be...2015, Suhas Chatekar, Learning NHibernate 4, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 291

Forms of leaky abstraction

pluralleaky abstractions

Origin of leaky abstraction

Popularised in 2002 by software engineer Joel Spolsky.

Questions about leaky abstraction

What does leaky abstraction mean?
Leaky abstraction means an abstraction that undesirably exposes details and limitations of its underlying implementation.
What part of speech is leaky abstraction?
Leaky abstraction is a noun.
What is the plural of leaky abstraction?
The plural of leaky abstraction is leaky abstractions.

Words near leaky abstraction in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: leaky abstraction (page history and authors). 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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