Word.ws English Dictionary

sharding

sharding is the present participle and gerund of shard.

Noun

sharding (countable and uncountable, plural shardings)

  1. A decomposition of a database into multiple smaller units that can handle requests individually.
    • A storage volume with many different potential shardings is analyzed more rapidly by the reuse of calculations made on neighboring vertices in the directed graph.2006, A Merchant, M Kallahalla, R Swaminathan, Sharding method and apparatus using directed graphs, US Patent 7,043,621
    • A sharding function determines which shard (chunk of data in the MapReduce framework) the pair is sent to.2007, T Brants, AC Popat, P Xu, FJ Och, J Dean, "Large Language Models in Machine Translation", in Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Empirical Methods in
  2. A breaking into shards.
    • A universe always shedding, a rain of sheddings and shardings.1991, Lorraine Anderson, Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature, page 196

Meaning of shard

Verb

shard (third-person singular simple present shards, present participle sharding, simple past and past participle sharded)

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

See all 11 meanings of shard

Forms of sharding

pluralshardings

Words formed from sharding

  • microsharding

Questions about sharding

What does sharding mean?
Sharding means a decomposition of a database into multiple smaller units that can handle requests individually.
What is sharding the present participle and gerund of?
Sharding is the present participle and gerund of shard.
What part of speech is sharding?
Sharding is a noun.
What is the plural of sharding?
The plural of sharding is shardings.

Words near sharding in the dictionary

  1. sharbing
  2. Sharchop
  3. shard
  4. Shardana
  5. sharded
  6. sharding
  7. shardings
  8. shardlike
  9. Shardlow
  10. Shardlows
  11. shards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sharding (page history and authors); shard (page history and authors). 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.

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Cite this entry: “sharding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sharding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.