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shard

Pronunciation: /ˈʃɑːd/

The English word “shard” has 11 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
  2. A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
  3. A food preparation similar in shape to a shard of, e.g., glass, generally made from a sheet of a hard product that is then shattered to produce smaller pieces.
  4. A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
  5. An instance of an MMORPG that is one of several independent and structurally identical virtual worlds, none of which has so many players as to exhaust a system's resources.
  6. A component of a sharded distributed database.
  7. A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
  8. The plant chard.

verb

  1. To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
  2. To break (something) into shards.
  3. To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.

Etymology

From Middle English shard, scherd, scheard, schord, from Old English sċeard (“a broken piece; shard”), from Proto-West Germanic *skard, from Proto-Germanic *skardą (“notch; nick”), from *skardaz (“damaged; nicked; scarred”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”). Akin to Scots schaird (“shard”), French écharde (“splinter”), Dutch schaarde (“tear; notch; fragment”), German Scharte…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.