The ultimate zomcom: How one word ate the dictionary

“Travelling in a fried-out Kombi, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie …” You know the words by heart or have the nerve to mumble them on karaoke night. Zombie-like in a way, a slave to the beat. Men At Work’s anthem, Down Under, didn’t just push a Vegemite sandwich onto the world, it kept the undead alive.

As a drug, zombie is a wipeout that chemists know as Xylazine, a sedative used by vets or certain Kombi passengers. Yet as a word, zombie has us hooked. Entranced. Bewitched. The Macquarie carries nine meanings from the walking dead to the rum cocktail.

As a noun, zombie can be an African snake god or virus-ridden computer, a supernatural force or space cadet. As a verb, to zombie is reappear online after a period of ghosting another. In Gen-Z slang, a zombie is your dead-breathed post-party self, or a stranger who stares above your eyeline as if peckish for your brains.

Next come the multiple “zombinations” from zombie bank (an insolvent institution sustained by government funds) to zombie debt: a defaulted payment revived to haunt the debtor. John Quiggin, professor of economics at the University of Queensland, published Zombie Economics (Black Inc, 2012) to highlight how “in the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land”.

Away from finance, a zombie fire burns underground. Zombie radio is that hosted music station feigning to be live. Zombie fungi infest ants from the inside out. Zoom zombies are platform users with ghoulish lighting, while smartphone zombies (alias crash-text dummies) are pedestrians so lost in their screens they shamble into bollards and other humans. In Hong Kong, such zombies are known as “dai tau juk”, or the head-down tribe.

True to horror films, ‘zombie’ the word has grown from germ to plague at pace. That snake god was square one, a python deity of west Africa central to voodoo practice. The word echoes two Kongo words: nzumbi (god) and zumbi (fetish). The vector, so to speak, to transfer the word to the west was The Magic Island (Harcourt, 1929) by American traveller William Seabrook. Not even a century ago, yet see how far this itchy-footed corpse has roamed.

Even Jane Austen was zombified in a 2009 novel by US parodist Seth Grahame-Smith.

Monster mash-ups followed, from White Zombie (1932) to George Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead. Lately we can’t move for bumping into a restless cadaver, be that Resident Evil (the game franchise) to zomcoms (the slapstick subgenre). Even Jane Austen was zombified in a 2009 novel by US parodist Seth Grahame-Smith.

So why? What’s with the word’s jump from the grave? Exiled to the dictionary’s backroom, ‘zombie’ seemed destined to stalk the alphabet, but its recent showreel has been frantic. Amanda Montell, an American linguist, links zombie’s rise to the cult of doomslang, where eco-anxiety and AI bots have eroded our capacity for optimism.

Montell calls it “the cognitive bias towards decline”, our cultural hunger for dystopia, where words like ‘hellscape’ and ‘dumpster fire’ blister the glossary, ‘doomscroll’ and ‘brainrot’, a gallows-humour flirting between alarm and apathy. ‘Zombie’ fits right in, best captured by a 2022 gag on then-Twitter from a comic avatar named Blue Berrymore: “Thank you for contacting the abyss. Your scream is important to us.”

Sound familiar? The unhelpful helpline, the vacuous HR-speak, the chatbot facsimiles of human conversation – as if you’re coexisting with someone who’s, well, not even living.

Get tips, tricks and word games from our crosswords guru, plus links to our online puzzles and quizzes, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sign up for our Puzzled with David Astle newsletter.