tegellike

Tegellike is an adjective used in technical writing to describe surfaces, textures, or morphologies that resemble tegells—small, flat plates or tiles that fit together to form a mosaic. The term is rare and not widely standardized; when used, it usually signals a plate-like, tessellated arrangement rather than a continuous or fibrous structure. Etymology is not well established in common dictionaries, and tegellike appears primarily as a coinage in niche disciplines, drawing on the sense of tile or plate with the English suffix -like.

In practice, tegellike describes patterns or arrangements where constituent units are discretely bounded and align in a repeating, tile-shaped fashion. This can occur in geological assemblages of flat crystals, in analyses of coatings or biomaterials, or in descriptions of certain fossilized exoskeletons that show overlapping plates. Because the emphasis is on discrete, interlocking plates, tegellike is often used to contrast with textures that are smooth, continuous, or fibrous.

Usage notes suggest that tegellike may be preferred when authors want to foreground the plate-like segmentation of a structure, but many writers opt for more common terms such as tessellated, plate-like, or tabulate. Tegellike thus functions as a descriptive option in specialized contexts, offering a precise image of mosaic or mosaic-like organization without committing to a specific material type.

See also: tessellated, tessellation, plate-like texture, tegula (where applicable).