patent leather

1. 1.

   leather with a hard glossy surface

   Broaderleather

Questions about patent leather

What does patent leather mean?

patent leather means "leather with a hard glossy surface".

Is patent leather a common word?

patent leather is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.