zombie

noun

Etymology: First attested in the 18th century. Partially through Louisiana Creole zombi (“zombie; ghost”), Haitian Creole zonbi (“zombie”), and French zombi (“zombie”). Ultimately from a Bantu language. Compare Kongo nzambi (“god”), zumbi (“fetish”), and Kimbundu nzumbi (“ghost”) (see Portuguese zumbi, Sranan Tongo dyumbi), and Caribbean folklore's jumbie (“a spirit or demon”).

1. A person, usually undead, animated by unnatural forces (such as magic), with no soul or will of his or her own, typically being slow, obedient, and harmless unless directed to be harmful.

   “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.”

   “The rumour had started that he was the Zombie or living corpse of Baron Samedi himself, the dreaded Prince of Darkness, and he fostered the story so that now it was accepted through all the lower strata of the negro world.”

2. A dead person, reanimated through some fictional agency as a fungus, virus, or the like, that has an insatiable desire to eat living humans, typically depicted as aggressive, fast moving, and infectious.

   “Ashley: Dad passed on a few years back. He's probably still watching, though. Shepard: He's not a zombie, is he?”

   “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.”

3. An apathetic or slow-witted person.
4. A human being in a state of extreme mental exhaustion.

   “After working for 18 hours on the computer, I was a zombie.”

5. Someone or something that should be dead but is not.

   “I would advise anyone who does not share its politics — surely the great majority of gay men and lesbians — to shun NOLAG for the anachronistic zombie it is.”

6. An information worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.
7. 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.”

8. A computer affected by malware which causes it to do whatever the attacker wants it to do without the user's knowledge.
9. A cocktail of rum and fruit juices.

   “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.”

   “She takes the taxi to the good hotel / Bon marché as far as she can tell / She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell”

10. 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?”

11. Marijuana, or similar drugs.

    “Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie”

12. A hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.
13. A person whose senses and faculties are severely dulled by drug use.

    “I'm worried about that guy on the corner, he is a fent zombie.”