Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A small part broken off or detached.
  • noun An incomplete or isolated portion; a bit.
  • noun Grammar A sentence fragment.
  • intransitive verb To break or separate (something) into fragments.
  • intransitive verb To become broken into fragments.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun 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.
  • noun 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.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part; as, a fragment of an ancient writing.
  • noun grammar A sentence not containing a subject or a predicate.
  • verb intransitive To break apart.
  • verb transitive To cause to be broken into pieces.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an incomplete piece
  • noun a broken piece of a brittle artifact
  • noun a piece broken off or cut off of something else
  • verb break or cause to break into pieces

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Latin fragmentum, from frangere, frag-, to break; see bhreg- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French, from Latin fragmentum ("a fragment, remnant"), from frangere, present active infinitive of frangō ("I break"). See also fraction.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Those sentence fragments. What a pain.

    January 25, 2007

  • Also, see frag.

    November 15, 2008