Definition of SHARD

shard

Meanings

Plural: shards

Noun

  • a broken piece of a brittle artifact
  • A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
  • 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.

Origin / 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.

Scrabble Score: 9

shard is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL word
shard is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
shard is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary

Words With Friends Score: 8

shard is a valid Words With Friends word