zombie

Noun

zombie (plural zombies)

1. (voodoo) 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.1943, Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, I Walked with a Zombie (motion picture)
   • 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.1954, Ian Fleming, “A Visiting-Card”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 21

   Synonyms:

   living dead

2. (horror) 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?2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →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...2017 February 23, Katie Rife, “The Girl With All The Gifts tries to put a fresh spin on overripe zombie clichés”, in The Onion AV Club

   Synonyms:

   deadhead, walker, walking dead, zed

3. (figuratively) An apathetic or slow-witted person.
4. (figuratively) A human being in a state of extreme mental exhaustion.
   • After working for 18 hours on the computer, I was a zombie.
5. (figuratively) 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.1982 February 13, Wayne Dynes, “Unnatural”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 29, page 4
6. An information worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.

   Synonyms:

   intellectual prostitute

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.
   • 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.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.
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.1943, Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, I Walked with a Zombie (motion picture)
   • She takes the taxi to the good hotel / Bon marché as far as she can tell / She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell1976, Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, “Haitian Divorce”, in The Royal Scam, performed by Steely Dan
10. (Canada, derogatory, historical) A conscripted member of the Canadian military during World War II who was assigned to home defence rather than to combat in Europe.
    • Had the time come to order Canada's home defense draftees—some 70,000 zombies idling at home—to battle overseas?1944, "Time for Decision," Time (US edition), 6 Nov.
11. (Australia, slang) Marijuana, or similar drugs.
    • Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie1980, Colin Hay, Ron Strykert, “Down Under”, performed by Men at Work

    Synonyms:

    bhang, benj, boo, broccoli, bud, buddha, cannabis, cheeba, choof, daccha

12. A hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

    Synonyms:

    p-zombie, philosophical zombie

13. (slang) 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.
14. (Philippines, slang) A person with a big appetite.