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What is "shard"

Crossword clues for shard

shard
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
shard
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a shard/splinter of glass (=a sharp piece of broken glass)
▪ People were injured by shards of glass following the explosion.
Shard London Bridge, the
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Engineers are better than other folks at making meaning out of the shards of facts and statistics.
▪ Everywhere you look, little shards of glass glistening in the lamplight.
▪ Out to a distance of seventy-five kilometers, windows are blown in and shards of glass are accelerated to high speeds.
▪ Part of the stage erupted at 1: 26 a. m., and metal shards flew all over Centennial Olympic Park.
▪ Ross turned and walked five steps when the blast blew out the glass and propelled hundreds of shards into his body.
▪ The shards of mirror: each one containing a memory of eyes.
▪ The guests were completely cowed, like golden calf worshippers contemplating shards of Moses' broken tablets.
▪ The pottery consisted of a small flask, a bowl and two shards.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Shard

Shard \Shard\ (sh[aum]rd), n. A plant; chard. [Obs.]
--Dryden.

Shard

Shard \Shard\ (sh[aum]rd), n. [AS. sceard, properly a p. p. from the root of scearn to shear, to cut; akin to D. schaard a fragment, G. scharte a notch, Icel. skar[eth]. See Shear, and cf. Sherd.] [Written also sheard, and sherd.]

  1. A piece or fragment of an earthen vessel, or a like brittle substance, as the shell of an egg or snail.
    --Shak.

    The precious dish Broke into shards of beauty on the board.
    --E. Arnold.

  2. (Zo["o]l.) The hard wing case of a beetle.

    They are his shards, and he their beetle.
    --Shak.

  3. A gap in a fence. [Obs.]
    --Stanyhurst.

  4. A boundary; a division. [Obs. & R.]
    --Spenser.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
shard

also sherd, Old English sceard "incision, cleft, gap; potshard, a fragment, broken piece," from Proto-Germanic *skardas (cognates: Middle Dutch schaerde "a fragment, a crack," Dutch schaard "a flaw, a fragment," German Scharte "a notch," Danish skaar "chink, potsherd"), a past participle from the root of Old English sceran "to cut" (see shear). Meaning "fragment of broken earthenware" developed in late Old English. Used late 14c. as "scale of a dragon." French écharde "prickle, splinter" is a Germanic loan-word.

Wiktionary
shard

Etymology 1 alt. 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 tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle. 4 (context online role-playing English) 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. n. 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 tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle. 4 (context online role-playing English) 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. vb. 1 (context intransitive English) To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion. 2 (context transitive English) To break (something) into shards. 3 (context online role-playing transitive English) To divide (an MMORPG) into several #Noun, or to establish a shard of one. Etymology 2

n. The plant chard.

WordNet
shard

n. a broken piece of a brittle artifact [syn: sherd, fragment]

Wikipedia
Shard

Shard may refer to:

  • Sherd (or shard), a piece of glass, pottery or stone—e.g., sea glass
  • Elytron, a forewing found on some insect species
  • Shard End, a place in Birmingham, United Kingdom
  • The Shard, a skyscraper in London, United Kingdom
  • Dresden Shard, a redesign of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany
  • Slang for the drug methamphetamine, referring to its shard-like crystals
Shard (comics)

Shard Bishop is a mutant character in the Marvel Comics universe.

Shard (database architecture)

A database shard is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each individual partition is referred to as a shard or database shard. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load.

Some data within a database remains present in all shards, but some only appears in a single shard. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset of data.

Usage examples of "shard".

The sigh was enough to make Benj chuckle in spite of his worry, a reaction which was shard my Seumas McDevitt, who had just come down from the weather lab.

It smashed into a mass of glass shards and ooze, drugs mixing with the soil from the bonsai trees and with the tangled clock innards.

Slowly and with the utmost care, one of the mantids draws something out from under a pile of glass shards and ceiling panels, holds it up.

Saul swung again, shattered the bearded silhouette of his own reflection as well as a muntin, tapped out the clinging shards of glass, and groped in the darkness for the latch.

He outmatched her physically, but her emotional core could blast his own into shards.

They may have been afraid of some pistolero smashing it to obtain a sharp shard of glass to aid an escape, but in my case all I wanted to do was get some sleep, and that sonofabitch was burning out my eye-sockets.

Often as big as a small platform, they looked like rafts floating on top of the smaller shards of rock, the similarity heightened by the fact that the rock of the cliff-face was evidently planar in structure.

I watch, amazed, through the shards of plastiglass in an abandoned storage room, my fingers at my mouth, teeth to nails, reverting to primitivism as the young people overpower the robo-cop by the airlock.

Shards of brittle bone protruded from both thighs and both knees, where Lara Raith had exercised her marksmanship.

She lifted her head to watch as it penetrated her, stretching the mouth of her vagina so impossibly wide, the surrounding skin crimson and quivering, his ruddy, heavy-headed dick reaming into her over and over, each thrust and withdrawal sending icy-hot shards of bliss through her system.

I used magic to reinflate your lung and knit the bone shards back together.

Shards of memory remain: a flash of swords in a twilit alleyway in the remilitarized zone.

She had started sharding, and if she was like most sharded Cues, she would one day be back in Glendale, under his authority.

Wyeth has been forcibly sharded three times in two days, and is now on her way to that refuge town.

Abigail came back for four days, then she sharded as the foundry, coming out of it just today.