What does "start up disk has no space" mean?

My iMac, version 10.6.8, all of a sudden has a pop up window that says 'your start up disk has no more space.  Please force quit these applications to continue.'  What does this mean? 

EDIT: sorry, Kappy, meant to reply to the OP.
I think the full message would have read "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory"
When you run out of available RAM/memory, the disk (the hard drive) is then used to as a kind of backup for applications to continue writing to memory. The extra memory gets written to the disk, where it really doesn't belong, and then if it runs out of disk space as well, there is no way for it to continue. Hence, the message to quit applications to free up memory.
Bottom line: you probably need to install more RAM, or if that is not possible, you can not have so many applications open concurrently.
You are probably also low on free drive space. To see how much you have, select the drive icon and do a GetInfo. You need to maintain 10-15% free of capacity.
To see how much free RAM you have, open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select System Memory and look down at the bottom left.
Message was edited by: WZZZ

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