Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A small part broken off or detached.
- n. An incomplete or isolated portion; a bit: overheard fragments of their conversation; extant fragments of an old manuscript.
- n. Grammar A sentence fragment.
- v. To break or separate (something) into fragments.
- v. To become broken into fragments: After the election, the coalition fragmented.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A part broken off or otherwise separated from a whole; a small detached portion; hence, a part of an unfinished whole, or of an uncompleted design: as, the fragments of a broken vase, of Anacreon's poems; this building is but a fragment of the original plan.
- n. A rationalistic work on the Bible, by Reimarus, a German critic of the eighteenth century. Synonyms Bit, scrap, chip, remnant.
- To break up into pieces: said of a cell-nucleus or nucleolus that breaks up amitotically into two or more pieces of unequal size.
Wiktionary
- n. A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part; as, a fragment of an ancient writing.
- n. A sentence not containing a subject or a predicate.
- v. To break apart.
- v. To cause to be broken into pieces.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an incomplete piece
- n. a broken piece of a brittle artifact
- n. a piece broken off or cut off of something else
- v. break or cause to break into pieces
Etymologies
- Middle English, from Latin fragmentum, from frangere, frag-, to break; see bhreg- in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“NOTES: As curious as the fragment is the periodical that published it.”
“. . . in the stiff, dead fingers, the petition of his slaves who toiled in Hell's Bottom.”
“As they took his money and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that the Prince of Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to scream for a boat -- and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he called a fragment of Our Saviour's cross.”
“Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to scream for a boat -- and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he called a fragment of Our Saviour's cross.”
“Again: fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.”
“Snicker at the sight of someone praying in front of a golden reliquary that houses a shard of bone or a skin fragment from a medieval saint or a pope.”
“An odd, amorous fragment from a letter written in Rome in June 1819 has survived.”
“Thursday brought another fragment from the autobiography as a night out with my son brought back a memory from my own high school days when I was the sharpest tack in the box, Young Lance Mannion, slow on the uptake.”
“Before that happens, the asteroid/planet fragment is attacked by Interstellar Carrion feeding off the dead and dying planets.”
52 – Week 20 – God is Fragged | Major Spoilers - Comic Book Reviews and News
“He was fond of quoting a fragment from a certain poem.”
“And what they did is they had taken Doug Prasher's clone, and cut out the appropriate-sized fragment from the DNA.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘fragment’.
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Undo
A list of terms that denote separating one thing from another, or deconstructing a thing into its parts or to a former state. E.g., untie, divorce, unscramble.
untie, divorce, unscramble, disunite, disjoin, undo, separate, disassemble, uncouple, unhitch, disassociate, disaffiliate and 178 more...
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Hence
Words with definitions that have a "hence" in them.
hanger, Deet, tripe, spindlelegs, fiddle, store, pluck, snap, villain, link, comedy, particular and 376 more...
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-ment
result; product; instrument; means
pavement, adornment, measurement, disappointment, appointment, reappointment, government, management, development, department, movement, agreement and 40 more...
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2
transition, contents, conformity, division, labour, prominent, complexity, interrelationalship, similarity, note, tentative, convey and 53 more...
elgiad007 Also, see frag. Nov 14, 2008
uselessness Those sentence fragments. What a pain. Jan 25, 2007