Liches and zombies
The word lich originally referred to any corpse, animated or not. It passed into fantasy gaming through pulp stories about reanimated necromancers when Gygax's misunderstood the word to mean an undead spellcaster. From there, he mixed it with Koschei the Deathless to get the phylactery.If one wishes to be etymologically accurate, then lich could be used in its original sense of a corpse (as in lichgate and lichyard). For example, the name zombie may be anachronistic or inaccurate because it originates from Haitian rather than European folklore; instead, characters from Not!Europe could call them liches.
In fact, this is almost exactly what the Overlord novel series does. There, an undead wizard progresses through the stages of (in ascending order) "skeleton mage," "elder lich" and "overlord."
If you wish to pull a G.R.R. Martin, then change the spelling to lytch (an historical variant spelling). This also matches the spelling of rhymes like pitch, hitch, and so on.
Conversely, there are similarities between the Haitian zombie and the fantasy lich. A Haitian zombie is created when a sorcerer steals a victim's soul to puppeteer their corpse, while a fantasy lich places their own soul within a reliquary (and often creates zombies while they're at it). Thus, one could refer to undead sorcerers as zombies (or zombie masters?) and have a stronger basis in folklore.
Alternately, you could use the term deathless (from Koschei the Deathless) instead. Although seemingly synonymous with undead, the distinction is that undead means "technically dead but still animate" whereas deathless means "immortal." This refers to them deliberately seeking immortality.
Wights
As the description in the 5e MM explains, "wight" originally meant any living creature (especially supernatural or unfortunate). Again, a gaming table might wish to be etymologically accurate. For example, a "forge wight" is a fire elemental that lives in a forge (see Creature Collection), a "barrow-wight" (grave man) or "mortwight" (dead man) is the original MM monster, etc. Tv tropes provides examples of exotic wights.ADDENDUM 7/13/2018: One could substitute the word draugr or draug, from the Norse monster that originally inspired Tolkien. The draug(r) appears in Tome of Horrors and Pathfinder Bestiary 2, where it is mistakenly assumed to be a purely aquatic undead.
Examples of non-traditional naming
- Color wight, The Lightbringer Series
- Cavewight, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
- Heartwight, The Elder Scrolls
- "Wight," Project Wight
- Cliff-ghast, His Dark Materials
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