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).

1. (used with a pl. verb) The lumpenproletariat.

2. (used with a sing. verb) A member of the lumpenproletariat.