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Definition of "lumpen" []

  • Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified: lumpen intellectuals unable to find work in their fields. (adjective)
  • Of or relating to the lumpenproletariat. (adjective)
  • Vulgar or common; plebeian: "Popular novelists and their mass readership remain a despised lumpen minority” ( Leslie Fiedler). (adjective)
  • The lumpenproletariat. (noun)
  • A member of the lumpenproletariat. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "lumpen" in a sentence
  • "Our social welfare R50 Billion budget per annum should address the basic needs of people and it should seek to address the problem of poverty, stemming from children, pensioners, people with HIV - AIDS, people with disabilities and the highly unemployable, what we term the lumpen proletariat."
  • "If Britain is broken, it's broken at the edges, the areas inhabited by what the left used to call the lumpen proletariat."
  • "Writing at some length at Labour Home about the complexity of the supposed "swing" to the Tories and the need to do the business for fairness I am a little surprised for this to be described as a lumpen core vote strategy and linked with some worthy Wiseman wishes and thepowerlesslowpaid's slogans by one Stephen Farrington of Cardiff."