Warning! SPOILERS ahead for The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2 premiere.
The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2 has introduced a new name for massive zombie hordes who roam its post-apocalyptic landscape. Already in its final season (it was only ever planned as a two season entry), the spinoff is showing more of the wider world of The Walking Dead. The Civic Republic and its military wing, the CRM, for instance, are shown to be a wide-reaching organization with potential settlements in New York and Pennsylvania. Not to mention, it's in contact with communities based in Omaha, Nebraska and Portland, Oregon.
That's an expansive reach given the size of the United States, and it's especially impressive given the near total collapse of any nationwide infrastructure. A big reason why the CRM has such a wide reach is its helicopters, which have been appearing across Walking Dead shows for several seasons now. While the CRM obviously uses its helicopters to cover a lot of ground, World Beyond's season 2 premiere introduces another way the CRM uses its helicopters, and it ties directly into the herds or hordes of walkers now shambling around the country.
In The Walking Dead season 2 premiere, "Konsekans", it's finally confirmed that the CRM are responsible for destroying both Omaha and the Campus Colony, murdering all the people who lived in these settlements. They did this not by having CRM soldiers attack them, but by using their fleet of helicopters to lure a huge horde - or as they're called by the CRM, a column - to plow through and decimate these communities. It's a frightening tactic and one The Walking Dead has shown on a smaller scale with the Whisperers, but the column seen in the World Beyond season 2 premiere is larger than anything before. And it's the size of them, that they are these swaths of walkers stretching out for miles, that explains why the CRM calls them them columns rather than hordes. At this size and with how the CRM moves them across the landscape, they do look like a bit like large columns, apart from not being upright.
Swapping hordes for columns isn't the first time World Beyond has introduced a new term to describe the dead, either. For example, characters on the spinoff typically don't refer to zombies as walkers, but instead call them empties (a term actually coined by Jesus in The Walking Dead comics). Zombies have also been referred to as roamers, lurkers, and biters on various occasions by different characters, so there really isn't a universal term. The name horde was also a newer addition to the lexicon, with the growing groups of zombies at first being referred to as herds before the Whisperers' huge herd began being referred to as a horde.
Now that The Walking Dead: World Beyond has introduced its new column name and the terrifying way the CRM has weaponized them, it'll be interesting to see where one turns up next. While the attack on Omaha was taking place, there was some discussion of the same happening to Portland, so further orchestrated attacks with a column are a real possibility. Additionally, if Elizabeth Kubleck can be believed at all, the size of the columns seems to be getting larger, meaning that they're might one day being a column so large that even the CRM and their helicopters won't be able to control it.