shard UK /ˈʃɑːd/US /ˈʃɑɹd/noun 8verb 3forms 3 noun8 •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 •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 •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 component of a sharded distributed database. •(Internet) 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. •[in the plural] (slang) A piece of crystal methamphetamine. •A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle. •The plant chard. verb3 •To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion. •To break (something) into shards. •(Internet) To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one. formssharded · sharding · shards
