shard means A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig. It carries an Arena rating of 1600, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, shard ranks #17 of 17,113 for Most Elegant Words, #1,474 of 17,115 for Most Vivid Words, #1,724 of 17,130 for Most Ingenious Words, #2,766 of 17,130 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words.
shard is pronounced /ʃaːd/.
Why “shard” is a great word
A sharp fragment of a brittle substance, such as glass, pottery, or rock. From Middle English shard, from Old English sċeard ("a broken piece"), from Proto-Germanic *skardą ("notch"), from the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)ker- ("to cut"), with the sense of "fragment of broken earthenware" developing in late Old English. Unlike a "fragment," which is any small, broken-off piece, or a "splinter," which is a sliver of wood or bone, a shard carries the specific violence of shatter—the sudden, catastrophic failure of something rigid and whole. It is the glinting menace in swept-up debris, the cruel geometry of a smashed windowpane, and the archaeological whisper of a Roman vessel lying in the dust; each piece is a small, dangerous monument to the fact that what was made to hold can also be made to wound.
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 (“notch”), Old Norse skarð (“notch, hack”) ( > Danish skår).
The database sense is perhaps derived from the online gaming sense or from SHARD (System for Highly Available Replicated Data), name of a 1980s database product.
noun
- A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.e.g.“You know there is something fascinating beyond that wall because someone's tried to stop you seeing over, and there are shards of glass embedded in the top.”
- A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
- A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
- 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.
- A component of a sharded distributed database.
- A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
- The plant chard.
verb
- To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
- To break (something) into shards.
- To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.
Words closest in meaning
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