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The book-keeping information for the zombie has to be retained so it can eventually be supplied to the parent when it does a " wait " system call. After the parent's wait call, the zombie process will be removed. Typically, zombies that exist for more than a short period of time indicate a bug somewhere.
A zombie process is not the same as an orphan process. Orphan processes don't become zombie processes; instead, they are adopted by init (process ID 1), and init will usually do a "wait" system call for them.
The term zombie process takes its meaning from the common definition of zombie–an undead person.