Definitions

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

  • noun A broken piece or fragment, as of pottery or glass.
  • noun Zoology A tough scale or covering, such as the elytron of a beetle.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A piece or fragment, as of an earthen vessel; a potsherd; a fragment of any hard material.
  • noun A scale; a shell, as of an egg or a snail.
  • noun The wing-cover or elytrum of a beetle.
  • noun A notch.
  • noun A gap in a fence.
  • noun An opening in a wood.
  • noun A bourn or boundary; a division.
  • noun The leaves of the artichoke and some other vegetables whitened or blanched.
  • noun Dung; excrement; ordure.

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

  • noun obsolete A plant; chard.
  • noun A piece or fragment of an earthen vessel, or a like brittle substance, as the shell of an egg or snail.
  • noun (Zoöl.) The hard wing case of a beetle.
  • noun obsolete A gap in a fence.
  • noun Obs. & R. A boundary; a division.

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

  • noun A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
  • noun A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
  • noun A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
  • noun online role-playing 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.
  • verb intransitive To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
  • verb transitive To break (something) into shards.
  • verb online role-playing, transitive To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.

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

  • noun a broken piece of a brittle artifact

Etymologies

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

[Middle English sherd, from Old English sceard, cut, notch; see sker- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English, from Old English sceard. Akin to German Scharte ("notch"), Old Norse skarð ("notch, hack") ( > Danish skår).

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