Don't say "interpreter" if you don't mean it. In the vast majority of cases, Common Lisp is a compiled language.
It's an interpreted one in the sense that one can continually interact with it during the life time of a program. Many of the popular interpreted languages nowadays do some compilation somewhere (Python, Perl, etc).
Many major Lisps (CL, Clojure, Scheme, Racket) are general purpose languages, and in common they excell at metaprogramming, interactive programming and control flow/debugging (see CL restarts).