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A shard is a sharp broken piece of something hard — glass, metal, or a pot. After a bottle falls, the floor is full of shards. People who study old pots pick up shards from the ground (they often write sherd for that). In everyday talk you can also say a bit of glass or a splinter; shard is a little more careful. Though actually, games and computer talk have borrowed it: a shard can be a broken crystal in a story, or one slice of a huge set of data. Those uses still picture a piece broken off a whole. This entry is the hard, sharp piece.
碎片（玻璃、金屬等鋒利的破片）
組成From Middle English shard, scherd, from Old English sċeard (“a broken piece”), from Proto-West Germanic *skard, from Proto-Germanic *skardą (“notch; nick”), from *skardaz (“damaged; nicked”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”).
同家族的字
- potsherda shard of pottery; same old word, often spelled sherd in that use
原始詞典資料11 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
shardnoun詞源 1/ˈʃɑːd/
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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.
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A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
- 2014, Paul Salopek, Blessed. Cursed. Claimed., National Geographic (December 2014)https://web.archive.org/web/20150212214621/http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/12/pilgrim-roads/salopek-text 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.
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cookingfoodlifestyleA 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.
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A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
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gamesgamingAn 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.
- 1997, Ultima Online. The term "shard" is related to the backstory of the game, in which the Gem of Immortality is shattered by the Stranger, the protagonist of Ultima I. "The planet was still bound to the jewel's magic, even as it lay shattered upon the floor of Mondain's castle. For, within each shattered remnant of the jewel, dwelled a perfect likeness of Sosaria. Thus is the world in which you are born, live, and die. Brittania, that was once Sosaria, now exists as a thousand worlds, each with its own peoples, history and destiny. This Brittania is but one of many in the multiverse that is... ...ULTIMA ONLINE." - Intro cinematic to the game, written by Michael Morlan https://web.archive.org/web/20080706122926/http://michael-morlan.net/pages/production/prod_uo.htm
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computingdatabasesengineeringA component of a sharded distributed database.
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slangA piece of crystal methamphetamine.
shardverb詞源 1/ˈʃɑːd/
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To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
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To break (something) into shards.
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gamesgamingTo divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.
shardnoun詞源 2/ˈʃɑːd/
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The plant chard.
- Not Heathpout, or the rarer Bird, Which Phasis, or Ionia yields, More pleasing Morsels would afford Than the fat Olives of my Fields; Than Shards or Mallows for the Pot, That keep the loosen’d Body sound, Or than the Lamb that falls by Lot, To the just Guardian of my Ground.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。