“The Zombulator will continue to wreak havoc,” opined a worried Web site named the Motley Fool a couple of weeks ago, “as long as we pursue a Zombie Bank policy. ” A few months before, a group of anxious academics wrote in The Irish Times that “Irish banks must be recapitalized if Ireland is to avoid a Japan-style prolonged recession, retarded by zombie banks.” And Mark Gilbert, a Bloomberg News columnist who thinks that “the zombie banks are demanding to be let back into the financial mall so they can pillage the global markets anew,” headlined his somewhat alarmist view: “Fresh Flesh Runs Screaming as Zombie Banks Drool.”

Blanch not, horror fans; the etymology of zombie offers understanding. An 1819 history averred that Zombi is the name for an Angolan diety; in 1872, the early student of Americanisms Maximilian Schele de Vere defined the proper noun as “a phantom or a ghost, not infrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants” and speculated that “the word is a Creole corruption of the Spanish sombra.” A century later, as the word lost its capital and picked up a final e, The Times of London reported that “a zombie, as every schoolboy knows, is a person who has been killed and raised from the dead by sinister voodoo priests called bocors.” The spooky name was then taken up by bartenders to describe a stupefying rum highball; at the turn of the millennium, the supposedly strolling stiffs, capable of giving a fright even to vampires, reappeared to denote a series of computers taken over by evil geeks to be used in concert to bombard a target site with choking data.

To current, rampant use: zombie, in reference to a bank with negative assets that survives thanks to government support, reports the O.E.D. lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, was apparently coined by Edward J. Kane in a 1987 article about the acts of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation in the journal Contemporary Policy Issues titled “Dangers of Capital Forbearance: The Case of the F.S.L.I.C. and ‘Zombie’ S.&L.’s.” The qualifier “apparently” is used because quotation marks in a citation often suggest earlier use, and zombie often refers to Japan’s decision in the ’80s to shore up its troubled banks in a way that led to its “lost decade” of stagflation. In 2004, a review in The Japan Times by Jeff Kingston of a book by Gillian Tett noted that in the 1990s “Japan’s zombie companies transformed their lenders into zombie banks, all kept on government life support.”

Ten days ago, 19 large United States banks bolstered by huge federal infusions reported on the varying results of the stress tests given by the government lender-investor-bailouter (the Zombulator?) to see how they could stand up to recession pressures. Stress test, an 1890s engineering term, began in the 1960s to be used to describe an electrocardiogram of the heart taken during exercise. Sheidlower dug up a stunning early application of the way it is used today: “The American dollar and the world’s confidence in the American economic system were being subjected to severe stress tests.” The reporter: David S. Broder. The year: 1978.