Zombie

Zombie (pronounced zom-bee)

(1) In voodoo, the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.

(2) The supernatural force itself.

(3) In informal use, a person whose behavior or responses are wooden, listless, or seemingly rote; automaton.

(4) In informal use, an eccentric or peculiar person.

(5) A snake god of African origin, worshiped in West Indian and Brazilian religious practices.

(6) A cocktail made typically with several kinds of rum, citrus juice, and often apricot liqueur.

(7) In financial market slang, a financial institution which continues to exist barely trades and has an asset book and balance sheet of zero value or less.

(8) In computing, a piece of code that instructs an infected computer to send a virus or other infection to other systems.

(9) In fiction, a deceased person who becomes reanimated to attack the living.

(10) In industrial relations, a worker who has signed a nondisclosure agreement.

(11) In computing, 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.

(12) In WWII Canadian military slang, a conscripted member of the military assigned to home defense rather than to combat in Europe.

(13) A slang term for various illegal narcotics in several markets.

(14) In philosophy, a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

(15) In the slang white collar crime, fake (invented, departed, deceased etc) employees maintained on a payroll for purpose of fraud.

1819 (in wider use after 1871): From a Bantu language, derived from either the Kongo zumbi (good-luck, fetish) or the Kimbundu nzambi (god).  It was originally the name of a snake god, the meaning "reanimated corpse" came later following the adoption by voodoo cults.  The familiar form is directly from Caribbean folklore's jumbee (a spirit or demon) and in this likely influenced by a Louisiana Creole French word meaning "phantom or ghost" and related to the Spanish sombra (shade; ghost).

Artist’s depiction of Lindsay Lohan as a zombie.

The sense of "slow-witted person" is recorded from 1936, influenced by the depictions of zombies in cult literature during the decade, a use that was widespread in film and other popular culture by the 1950s.  However, although in Haitian folklore, a zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is an animated corpse raised by means of witchcraft and the concept has been popularly associated with the religion of voodoo, academic research has made clear it’s not part of the faith's formal practices.  In the theological sense, when practiced in the region, it’s a thing of cults and the relationship to voodoo is akin to that between Satanism and Christianity.