A member is a contact in your database that has an Active membership.
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If a contact has no active memberships, they're typically referred to as just a contact – although, since everyone in your database is a contact, this term is interchangeable.
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Membership is an instance of an Active membership level. 

Memberships capture the start date/end date of entire Membership(s) with your organisation, whereas subscriptions look at the start and end date of just a current membership.

It's possible to have many memberships for a single contact and many contact's for a single membership.
For example, you can have a family membership with many members. Consider a basic family membership with Two Adults and Two Children. This would count as one membership, and four members.

The membership level holds all the information about a particular membership type i.e description, inclusions, date rules and prices.

Common membership types include Life Member; Under <age> Member; <year> Member etc.

Memberships are based on membership levels and members are assigned to memberships.

A membership is made up of multiple subscription periods. Each time a Contact renews, they are obtaining another subscription.

e.g. a contact could have a membership of your organisation that spans years (e.g. 2022 - 2025) but each subscription would be for the individual membership periods (e.g. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 etc).