deallocate

This term is used almost exclusively within computer science and software engineering. It describes the specific action of marking a memory address or resource as free, contrasting with allocation, which reserves those resources for a program's use.

Failure to properly deallocate memory leads to a memory leak, where a program consumes more and more RAM over time without releasing it. In languages with automatic memory management, such as Java or Python, this process is handled by a garbage collector, whereas in languages like C or C++, the programmer must manually deallocate memory using specific commands.