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REFERENCE

zombie

n.
US //ˈzɑmbi// UK //zˈɒmbi// zom·bie
  1. 1 undead creature (n.)
    B1 Intermediate

    a dead person who has been brought back to life, usually in horror movies or stories.

    a reanimated corpse, typically depicted in fiction as lacking a soul or independent will and often driven by a hunger for human flesh.

    Example

    In the movie, the survivors had to hide in a shopping mall to escape the zombies.

    Example

    Modern pop culture has transformed the zombie from a figure of folklore into a versatile metaphor for societal collapse and viral contagion.
  2. 2 exhausted person (n.)
    B2 Upper Intermediate Informal

    someone who is so tired or bored that they move and think very slowly.

    a person who appears to be in a daze or state of extreme mental exhaustion, often characterized by a lack of responsiveness.

    Example

    I was such a zombie this morning because I only got three hours of sleep.

    Example

    After forty-eight hours of continuous coding, the developers were walking around the office like zombies, barely able to hold a conversation.
    • sleepwalker
    • automaton
  3. 3 infected computer (n.)
    C1 Advanced Technical Computing

    a computer that has been taken over by a virus so it can be used for cyber attacks without the owner knowing.

    a computer connected to the internet that has been compromised by a hacker, computer virus, or trojan horse and can be used to perform malicious tasks.

    Example

    The hacker used thousands of zombie computers to crash the bank's website.

    Example

    The security firm identified a massive botnet consisting of over fifty thousand zombie machines used to coordinate a distributed denial-of-service attack.
  4. 4 terminated process (n.)
    C2 Proficiency Technical Computing

    a computer program that has finished but is still showing up in the system's list of active tasks.

    a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table, usually because its parent process has not yet read its exit status.

    Example

    You need to restart the server to clear out those zombie processes.

    Example

    The system administrator noticed several zombie processes lingering in the background, indicating a bug in the parent application's signal handling.
    • defunct process
  5. 5 philosophical construct (n.)
    C2 Proficiency Academic Formal

    an imaginary person who acts like a human but has no internal feelings or consciousness.

    a hypothetical being that is physically identical to a human but lacks conscious experience or qualia.

    Example

    Philosophers use the idea of a zombie to talk about how the mind works.

    Example

    The 'philosophical zombie' argument is frequently used to challenge physicalist theories of consciousness by suggesting that physical facts do not necessarily entail subjective experience.
    • p zombie
Origin

First attested in the 18th century. From a Bantu language. Compare Kongo nzambi (“god”), zumbi (“fetish”), and Kimbundu nzumbi (“ghost”) (see Portuguese zumbi, Sranan Tongo dyumbi), and Caribbean folklore's jumbee (“a spirit or demon”). May have come through Louisiana Creole zombi (“zombie; ghost”). See also French zombi (“zombie”). A possible origin from Spanish sombra (“shadow, phantom”) has also been suggested.

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Idioms1 entry
Related words

Last updated June 20, 2026