shard
UK/ˈʃɑːd/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Australia/ˈʃɐːd/
shard noun: a piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
Noun (1)
shard (plural shards)
- A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
- 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.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 29
- Synonyms:
- potsherd
- A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
- Inside its exhibit hall, behind panes of glass, in a white-lit lab, a team of restorers works on an ancient Byzantine floor: 44 square yards of stone shards rescued from Lot’s Cave Monastery.2014, Paul Salopek, Blessed. Cursed. Claimed., National Geographic (December 2014)https://web.archive.org/web/20150212214621/http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/12/pilgrim-roads/salopek-text
- Synonyms:
- splinter
- 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.
- A shard of chocolate adorns the dish.
- 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.
- "The planet was still bound to the jewel's magic, even as it lay shattered upon the floor of Mondain's castle. For, within each shattered remnant of the jewel, dwelled a perfect likeness of Sosaria. Thus is the world in which you are born, live, and die. Brittania, that was once Sosaria, now exists...1997, Ultima Online. The term "shard" is related to the backstory of the game, in which the Gem of Immortality is shattered by the Stranger, the protagonist of Ultima I.
- A component of a sharded distributed database.
- Synonyms:
- partition
- A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
Verb
shard (third-person singular simple present shards, present participle sharding, simple past and past participle sharded)
- 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.
Noun (2)
shard (uncountable)
- The plant chard.
- Not Heathpout, or the rarer Bird,
Which Phasis, or Ionia yields,
More pleasing Morsels would afford
Than the fat Olives of my Fields;
Than Shards or Mallows for the Pot,
That keep the loosen’d Body sound,
Or than the Lamb that falls by Lot,
To the just Guardian of my Ground.1684, John Dryden, “From Horace, Epode 2”, in The Second Part of Miscellany Poems, 4th edition, London: Jacob Tonson, page 79
- Not Heathpout, or the rarer Bird,
shard meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Telugu
shard in Hindi
- shard, fragment
- किरच kirac
shard in Tamil
- வண்டாடை
shard in Urdu
- شارڈ
shard in Telugu
- షార్డ్
More languagesFewer languages
- shard in Malayalam
- പൊട്ടിയ കഷണം, കഷണം, കമ്പോട്, ശകലം
- shard in Punjabi
- ਸ਼ਾਰਡ
- shard in Tagalog
- bubog
- shard in Arabic
- كِسْرَة kisra
- shard in Persian
- شکاله šekâle, سفاله sefâle
Examples of shard in a sentence
- The janitor broomed up the shards of glass.
- Load some shards in that pickle.
- The wine runs into pitchers, washing-basins, shards, chamber- vessels, and other extemporized receptacles.
Synonyms of shard
Forms of shard
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | shards |
| alternative form | sherd |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | shards |
| present participle | sharding |
| past participle | sharded |
| past | sharded |
Origin of shard
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.
Words formed from shard
Words that rhyme with shard
Questions about shard
- What does shard mean?
- Shard means a piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
- What is shard in Hindi?
- Shard in Hindi is किरच (kirac). See Shard meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is shard?
- Shard can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce shard?
- Shard is pronounced /ˈʃɑːd/ (UK).
- What is the plural of shard?
- The plural of shard is shards.
Words near shard in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shard (page history and authors); किरच (Hindi) (page history and authors); shard (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); shard (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); shard (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); shard (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); shard (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-shard.ogg.
Cite this entry: “shard.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shard. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.