lumper

plural lumpers

1. An extra laborer hired to assist in the loading or unloading of a truck or a ship.

   1 more example

   There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front.

   1896 November – 1897 May, Rudyard Kipling, “Captains Courageous”, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, published 1897, →OCLC

2. biologyA scientist in one of various fields who prefers to keep categories such as species or dialects together in larger groups.

   Antonyms: splitter

3. dialectalA militiaman.
4. historicalSynonym of lumpman (“type of salt worker”).

   Synonyms: lumpman

plural lumpers

1. dialectalA lamprey.

present singular third person lumpers · participle present lumpering · participle past lumpered · past lumpered

1. archaicintransitiveTo lumber; to plod.

   But, my dear woman, why ever have ye come lumpering up to Rainbarrows at this time o' night?

   1904, Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars, […], part first, London: Macmillan and Co.: New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, Act II, scene v, page 81

   2 more examples

   Over piggeries, and mixens, and apples, and hay, / They lumpered straight into the night; / And finding bylong where a halter-path lay, / At dawn reached Tim's house […]

   1866 (date written), Thomas Hardy, “The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s”, in Wessex Poems and Other Verses, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers, published 1898, →OCLC, page 190

   Lord, what's the good o' my lumpering all the way to church and back again, when I'm as deaf as a plock?

   1929, Thomas Hardy, Old Mrs. Chundle, New York: Crosby Gaige, →OCLC, page 11

plural Lumpers

1. countableuncountableA variety of potato, best known as the variety that failed in the Irish potato famine.

   “Over there I'm growing Lumper,” he tells us as we look across potato rows growing between poplar windbreaks.

   2012, David Buchanan, Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors, and Why They Matter, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   The Lumper, as they call this particular variety of pots, is a symbol of this Irish dilemma, for this is the infamous potato that failed in the 1840s and caused the great famine. The Lumper is therefore one of the most historic of all the heirloom potato varieties now preserved under the careful eye of historic museums and potato enthusiasts alike, myself included.

   2013, William Woys Weaver, 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, →ISBN, page 146

   In the 1840s, however, these two counties were among the worst affected when Ireland's potatoes -- those big floury Lumpers that sustained millions -- began to rot.

   2015, Fiona Farrell, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, →ISBN, page 39