1. 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.2. Of or relating to the lumpenproletariat. 3. Vulgar or common; plebeian: “Popular novelists and their mass readership remain a despised lumpen minority” (Leslie Fiedler, New York Times Book Review May 31, 1981).
NOUN:
1.(used with a pl. verb) The lumpenproletariat. 2.(used with a sing. verb) A member of the lumpenproletariat.
ETYMOLOGY:
From German Lumpenproletariat, the lowest section of the proletariat. See lumpenproletariat.
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