Noun: shard shaa(r)d
- A broken piece of a brittle artifact
"Archaeologists carefully collected shards of ancient pottery from the excavation site";
- sherd, fragment
- (computing) a partitioned segment of a database or data structure, often distributed across multiple servers
"The system was designed to store data in shards for better scalability"
Derived forms: shards
Type of: piece
Encyclopedia: Shard