alligator

Pluralalligators

Formsalligators, alligatoring, alligatored

1. 1
   nouncountable

   Either of two large amphibious reptiles with sharp teeth and very strong jaws, in the genus Alligator: one native to the Americas, the other to China.

   A young alligator basked on the bank near the boat launch.

   Chinese alligators are far smaller than their American relatives.

   Note

   The name is a Spanish phrase run together: el lagarto, "the lizard," from Latin lacertus. It passed through early spellings such as alagarto and alligarta, and the modern form may have been nudged by an unrelated Latin alligator, "one who binds." To tell it from a crocodile, look at the closed mouth. Maurice and Robert Burton's International Wildlife Encyclopedia (2002) notes that the alligator's upper teeth sit outside the lower ones.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Any reptile belonging to the family Alligatoridae, a group that also includes the caimans.

   In the broad zoological sense, every caiman is an alligator.

   The family includes not only the familiar alligators but also the caimans of Latin America.

   Note

   A family-level use, at home in paleontology and zoology. Here the word stretches to cover all of Alligatoridae, so caimans count as alligators too. In everyday speech the word means only the two true alligators of the genus Alligator. When you read it in a scientific context, check which scope is meant before assuming a caiman has been misnamed.

3. 3
   interjection

   Spoken between numbers when counting out loud, making each number fall roughly one second after the previous one.

   She whispered "five alligator, six alligator" while waiting for the thunder.

   Counting one alligator, two alligator, the children paced out a steady rhythm for the game.

   SimilarMississippi

   Note

   A filler word whose job is to take up a second. It is usually hyphenated to the number before it: one-alligator, two-alligator, three-alligator. Chuck Palahniuk's Doomed (2013) uses it the way many people do, counting the gap between lightning and thunder. Mississippi does the same work in many people's counting.

4. 4
   verbintransitive

   To crack into a pattern of small interconnected fissures resembling the hide of an alligator.

   The varnish on the antique table alligatored over the decades.

   Asphalt road surfaces alligator when the base beneath them fails.

   Similarcrack, craze

   Note

   A trade word for a failing surface, most often met as alligatoring and alligatored. Home inspectors use it of sun-brittled asphalt roofing. Facility managers speak of sealing or replacing an alligatored section. Fire investigators list it among burn indicators beside crazing and spalling. The verb is intransitive: a coating alligators by itself, and nobody alligators it.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A shoe made from the hide of an alligator, prized for its distinctive scaly leather.

   The dancer's gleaming alligators caught the stage lights.

   He kept one battered alligator as a memento of his first big paycheck.

   Note

   A word usually met in the plural, the way shoes and boots are: a pair of alligators, his alligators. The singular is possible for one shoe, but in most sentences the plural is the natural choice. The plural also makes clear that footwear is meant rather than the animal.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   Any of various strong-jawed machines in which one jaw opens the way an alligator's movable jaw does.

   The scrapyard's hydraulic alligator bit through steel beams as if they were breadsticks.

   Before the shift, the operator checked that the alligator's moving jaw closed cleanly against the fixed one.

   Note

   Several trades borrowed the same bite. The rock breaker, the puddle-ball squeezer and a kind of job press all go by this name, because each grips its work between a fixed jaw and one that swings open. The word therefore describes how a machine closes, not what it is built to do, and only the surrounding trade tells you which machine is meant.

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