alligatored

1. 1
   adjective

   Of paint, varnish, or a similar finish, broken into a network of cracks and ridges that resemble the scaly hide of an alligator.

   Much like a dried-out riverbed that fractures into a mosaic of curling plates.

   Restorers found the entire canvas alligatored, its surface webbed with fine cracks.

   Decades of harsh sun had left the boat's hull alligatored and peeling.

   Similarcracked, crazed

   Note

   A restorer's word built straight from the animal: alligator plus -ed, naming a damaged finish after the hide it comes to resemble. In Valérie Dorge and F. Carey Howlett's Painted wood: history and conservation (1998), it sits beside "deteriorated" as a condition to be stripped away. As an adjective it grades (more alligatored, most alligatored), which the past-tense verb form cannot do.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of alligator.

   The lacquer alligatored as the lower coat kept shrinking beneath it.

   Cheap enamel had alligatored across the radiator within a single summer.

   Note

   The verb behind this form is intransitive: a finish alligators by itself, with no one doing it to it. So the form turns up in plain past statements (the lacquer alligatored) and in perfects with have (it had alligatored by spring), but not in passives. When it describes a surface's condition rather than an event, it has become the adjective for cracked paint.

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