zombie
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: computing
engineering
human-sciences
mathematics
natural-sciences
philosophy
physical-sciences
sciences
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”).
Inflected forms:
form: zombies
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: zombi
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: zomby
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: zumbi
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
The zombies were having fun
The party had just begun
The guests included Wolf-Man, Dracula, and his son.
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
gloss: An apathetic or slow-witted person.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
gloss: A human being in a state of extreme mental exhaustion.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: After working for 18 hours on the computer, I was a zombie.
gloss: Someone or something that should be dead but is not.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: 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.
gloss: An information worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.
pos: noun
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
gloss: A computer affected by malware which causes it to do whatever the attacker wants it to do without the user's knowledge.
pos: noun
gloss: A cocktail of rum and fruit juices.
pos: noun
examples: 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
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.
gloss: A conscripted member of the Canadian military during World War II who was assigned to home defence rather than to combat in Europe.
pos: noun
tags: Canada
derogatory
historical
examples: 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?
gloss: Marijuana, or similar drugs.
pos: noun
tags: Australia
slang
examples: Traveling in a fried-out Kombi / On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
gloss: A hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.
pos: noun
gloss: A person whose senses and faculties are severely dulled by drug use.
pos: noun
tags: slang
examples: I'm worried about that guy on the corner, he is a fent zombie.
Derived words: Aberzombie
antizombie
dezombification
dezombify
phone zombie
smartphone zombie
xanbie
zimbo
zombic
zombically
zombie apocalypse
zombie bank
zombie banker
zombie box
zombie business
zombie car
zombie cell
zombie client
zombie company
zombie computer
zombie crawl
zombie dance
zombie debt
zombie debtor
zombie deer disease
zombie economy
zombie effect
zombie finger
zombie fire
zombie formalism
zombie fungus
zombie government
zombie host
zombie hypothesis
zombieing
zombie institution
zombie knife
zombieless
zombie lie
zombielike
zombie master
zombie mortgage
zombieness
zombie network
zombie organization
zombie out
zombie path
zombiephile
zombiephilia
zombie process
zombie program
zombie S&L
Zombie Simpsons
zombie software
zombie star
zombie state
zombie statistic
zombie strip
zombie system
zombie tag
zombie taxon
zombie theory
zombie thought experiment
zombie urbanism
zombie user
zombie version
zombie walk
zombie world
zombie worm
zombification
zombify
zomboid
zombyish
Translations: