shard

Meanings

Noun

• A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
• A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
• A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
• 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.
• A component of a sharded distributed database.
• A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
• The plant chard.

Verb

• To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
• To break (something) into shards.
• To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.

Origin

• From Middle English shard, scherd, scheard, schord, from Old English sċeard, from Proto-Germanic *skardą, from *skardaz, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker-. Akin to Scots schaird, French écharde, Dutch schaarde, German Scharte, Old Norse skarð ( > Danish skår).
• The database sense is perhaps derived from the online gaming sense{{cite-web
• |url=https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo
• |date=2009-01-18
• |title=Database “sharding” came from UO?
• |work=Raph Koster's Website
• |author=Raph Koster
• |authorlink=Raph Koster
• or from SHARD (System for Highly Available Replicated Data), name of a 1980s database product.