zombie

Etymology

First attested in 1871. From a Bantu language. Compare Kongo nzambi (“god”), zumbi (“fetish”), and Kimbundu nzumbi (“ghost”) (see Portuguese zumbi), and Caribbean folklore's jumbee (“a spirit or demon”). Origin from Spanish sombra (“shadow, phantom”) has also been suggested. May have come through Louisiana Creole [Term?]. See also French zombi (1832).

noun

1. (voodoo, horror) A person, usually undead, animated by unnatural forces (such as magic), with no soul or will of his/her own.
   Betsy Connell: I don't know about zombies, doctor. Just what is a zombie? / Dr. Maxwell: A ghost. A living dead. It's also a drink. 1943, Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, I Walked with a Zombie (motion picture)
   Ashley: Dad passed on a few years back. He's probably still watching, though. Shepard: He's not a zombie, is he? 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: SSV Normandy
   The zombies first show up 20 minutes in, after Melanie volunteers herself as the next child to mysteriously disappear in the middle of the night. That’s when we learn that Melanie and her classmates are all “hungries,” or people infected with a toxic fungus that turns them into mindless flesh-eating animals. February 23, 2017, Katie Rife, “The Girl With All The Gifts tries to put a fresh spin on overripe zombie clichés”, in The Onion AV Club
2. (figurative) An apathetic or slow-witted person.
3. (figurative) A human being in a state of extreme mental exhaustion.
   After working for 18 hours on the computer, I was a zombie.
4. An information worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.
5. (computing) A process or task which has terminated but has not been removed from the list of processes, typically because it has an unresponsive parent process.
   1986, Maurice J. Bach, The Design of the Unix Operating System, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA, See "Process States and Transitions," p. 147. 9. The process executed the exit system call and is in the zombie state. The process no longer exists, but it leaves a record containing an exit code and some timing statistics for its parent process to collect. The zombie state is the final state of a process.
6. (computing) A computer affected by malware which causes it to do whatever the attacker wants it to do without the user's knowledge.
7. A cocktail of rum and fruit juices.
   She takes the taxi to the good hotel / Bon marché as far as she can tell / She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell 1976, Walter Becker, Donald Fagen (lyrics and music), “Haitian Divorce”, in The Royal Scam, performed by Steely Dan
   The maitre d’ introduced us and I had a zombie with him. Those zombies are wicked. […] I watched Mario and drank zombies out of a thermos. 1976, Harvard Advocate CX:ii, pages 8 and 380
8. (Canada, historical, derogatory) A conscripted member of the Canadian military during World War II who was assigned to home defence rather than to combat in Europe.
   1944, "Time for Decision," Time (US edition), 6 Nov., Had the time come to order Canada's home defense draftees—some 70,000 zombies idling at home—to battle overseas?
9. (Australia, slang) Marijuana, or similar drugs.
   Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie 1980, Colin Hay, Ron Strykert (lyrics and music), “Down Under”, performed by Men at Work
10. (philosophy) A hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.