zombie

Meaning

Noun

• A snake god or fetish in religions of West Africa and elsewhere.
• A person, usually undead, animated by unnatural forces (such as magic), with no soul or will of his/her own.
• An apathetic person.
• A human being in a state of extreme mental exhaustion.
• An information worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.
• 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.
• A computer affected by malware which causes it to do whatever the attacker wants it to do without the user's knowledge.
• A cocktail of rum and fruit juices.
• A conscripted member of the Canadian military during World War II who was assigned to home defence rather than to combat in Europe.
• Marijuana, or similar drugs.
• A hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

Origin

• Ultimately from a language. Compare Kongo nzambi ("god"), zumbi, and Kimbundu nzumbi ("ghost") (see Portuguese zumbi), and Caribbean folklore's jumbee. May have come through Louisiana Creole French. See also French zombi.