# zombie

/ˈzɑmbi/ (US) · /zˈɒmbi/ (UK)

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/zombie
Updated: 2026-06-20

## Senses

### 1. undead creature

noun · CEFR B1

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

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

- In the movie, the survivors had to hide in a shopping mall to escape the zombies.
- Modern pop culture has transformed the zombie from a figure of folklore into a versatile metaphor for societal collapse and viral contagion.

### 2. exhausted person

noun · CEFR B2 · Informal

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

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

- I was such a zombie this morning because I only got three hours of sleep.
- After forty-eight hours of continuous coding, the developers were walking around the office like zombies, barely able to hold a conversation.

### 3. infected computer

noun · CEFR C1 · Technical

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

For teachers: 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.

- The hacker used thousands of zombie computers to crash the bank's website.
- The security firm identified a massive botnet consisting of over fifty thousand zombie machines used to coordinate a distributed denial-of-service attack.

### 4. terminated process

noun · CEFR C2 · Technical

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

For teachers: 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.

- You need to restart the server to clear out those zombie processes.
- The system administrator noticed several zombie processes lingering in the background, indicating a bug in the parent application's signal handling.

### 5. philosophical construct

noun · CEFR C2 · Academic · Formal

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

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

- Philosophers use the idea of a zombie to talk about how the mind works.
- The 'philosophical zombie' argument is frequently used to challenge physicalist theories of consciousness by suggesting that physical facts do not necessarily entail subjective experience.

## Examples

- The movie is about a group of people surviving a zombie attack.
- After staying up all night to finish the report, he walked into the office looking like a total zombie.
- The security team identified a network of zombie computers that were being used to launch a coordinated denial-of-service attack against the government's main server.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.