Anil Krishna 
Jonathan Millar 
James Oconner 
The Undead Lexicon: Why The Walking Dead Created Its Own Zombie Language
© AMC Networks
When people talk about the biggest threats in The Walking Dead, it’s usually Negan, the Governor, Alpha or one of the other human villains who gets the attention. But there has always been another threat hanging around in the background, and unlike most of the villains, it never really goes away. The walkers are everywhere. They might not always be the most interesting part of the story, but they’re still the reason civilization collapsed in the first place.
What’s interesting, though, is how many different names the survivors have given them over the years. Depending on where they are and who they’re talking to, the undead can be walkers, roamers, lurkers, biters, rotters, empties and plenty of other things. It can seem a little random at first, but there’s actually a reason the franchise ended up with its own strange little zombie vocabulary.
Walkers, Roamers and Lurkers
“Walkers” is obviously the name most fans associate with The Walking Dead. The word appears right from the beginning of the original series and fits the creatures pretty well. They’re dead people who have come back and, for the most part, spend their time shambling around looking for something alive to eat. But as the survivors moved around and encountered different kinds of walkers, they started giving names to particular behaviors. Not every dead body was necessarily a threat in exactly the same way, after all. Some wandered around constantly, while others could stay completely still until somebody made the unfortunate decision to get too close.
That’s where terms like “roamers” and “lurkers” come in. Roamers are the walkers that keep moving, usually drifting around in groups while looking for prey. Lurkers are much nastier in a different way because they can look completely dead even by walker standards. A body might be lying on the ground, barely moving at all, and then suddenly spring into action when someone gets within reach. In a world where basically everything can kill you, that kind of surprise is pretty awful.
Every Group Has Its Own Name for the Dead
One of the fun little details about The Walking Dead is that there was never really one universal vocabulary for the undead. Different communities came up with different names, usually based on what they had seen or simply what felt natural to them. In Woodbury, for example, people used “biters.” It’s not exactly poetic, but it gets the point across. Other names were even more specific. “Floaters” could refer to bloated corpses found underwater, while “rotters” was used for walkers that had already decomposed badly. Once you think about it, most of these names are pretty practical. Nobody in the middle of an apocalypse is going to sit down and debate whether a new term sounds elegant.
Then there are names that say a little more about how people see the undead. The Walking Dead: World Beyond introduced “empties,” which is probably one of the more interesting terms in the franchise. The word suggests that there’s nothing left inside the body anymore. It might still look like a person, but the person who once lived there is gone. And those are only a few examples. Across the original show and its various spinoffs, the survivors have come up with all sorts of names, including “geeks,” “lame-brains,” “creepers” and “skin-eaters.” Some of them sound threatening, some sound almost silly, and some feel like names people would actually invent after spending years surrounded by the undead.
So Why Doesn’t Anyone Say “Zombie”?
This is probably the most interesting part of the whole thing. Despite being one of the biggest zombie franchises ever made, The Walking Dead almost never uses the word “zombie.” That isn’t an accident. Robert Kirkman established early on that zombies, at least as a fictional concept, don’t exist in the world of The Walking Dead. There are no George A. Romero movies that the characters grew up watching. There isn’t a long history of zombie movies and horror stories teaching people what to expect when the dead start walking.
That changes the situation quite a bit.
Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that dead people are getting back up and attacking the living, but you’ve never seen a zombie movie in your life. You wouldn’t automatically know what to call them. You’d probably just describe what you’re seeing. They walk, so maybe they’re walkers. They bite, so maybe they’re biters. They don’t move until you get close, so perhaps they’re lurkers.
That is essentially what happened in the series. The survivors had to build a vocabulary from scratch because there wasn’t an existing fictional blueprint sitting in their heads. It sounds like a small detail, but it actually helps make the apocalypse feel more believable. These people aren’t characters who know they’re inside a zombie story. They’re people trying to understand something completely new and horrifying while it’s happening to them.
And that’s really what makes the strange language of The Walking Dead work. The different names aren’t just there to give the writers more ways to say “zombie.” They show how different groups adapted to the same nightmare in their own way. After years of living with the dead, of course people would stop calling them all the same thing. Language changes when circumstances change, and in The Walking Dead, there probably aren’t many circumstances more extreme than the end of the world.
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