The term "zombie" has a very specific, if somewhat whimsical, meaning for a Unix operating system. On Unix, every process is created ("forked") by a parent process. The parent process is expected to wait for its child to exit, after which the parent collects certain statistics about the completed child process. When a child process has executed the exit() system call, but its parent has not yet collected those statistics, the child process is said to be in the "zombie" state. Think of it as a process which as died but has not yet left this world.

Zombies are also a general idea. I think if you told any computer science person that there were zombie objects in your system, they would understand what you mean: you have dead objects (of whatever kind) floating around, but for consistency's sake they can't yet take the final step into the abyss. Granted, I can't think of a specific example....

(Of course, if the objects are still being used, it means the objects aren't *really* dead after all, doesn't it? But then, are zombies really dead? Hmmmm. :))

-Lex