shard
/ˈʃɑːd/noun, verb
shard is spelled S-H-A-R-D: 5 letters and one syllable. It appears 1.0 times per million words in written English, the 28,918th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, shard means “A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of shard is shards.
How many letters and syllables are in shard?
| Letters | 5: S-H-A-R-D |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 1 |
| In writing | 1.0 times per million words; the 28,918th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | none measured in search |
| Rhymes with | |
| Same letters |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.
How common is shard?
Shard appears 1.0 times per million words in written English, the 28,918th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce shard?
- UK /ˈʃɑːd/
- UK [ˈʃɑːd]
- Australia /ˈʃɐːd/
Shard has one syllable.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-shard.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
What rhymes with shard?
4 words on PlainSpell end in the same sounds as shard from its last stressed vowel (/ɑd/, British pronunciation):
Spelled with the same letters in another order: hards, drash.
Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).
Forms of shard
- shards plural, present, singular, he/she/it
- sherd
- sharding participle, present
- sharded participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does shard mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
- 2
A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
- 3
A 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.
- 4
A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
- 5
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.
- 6
A component of a sharded distributed database.
- 7
slangA piece of crystal methamphetamine.
- 8
The plant chard.
verb
- 1
To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
- 2
To break (something) into shards.
- 3
To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Shard in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | éclat, tesson , éclater |
| German | Scherbe |
| Portuguese | caco, estilhaço |
| Spanish | casco, añicos, esquirla, tiesto , estallar , tasquil |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does shard come from?
From Middle English shard, scherd, scheard, schord, from Old English sċeard (“a broken piece; shard”), from Proto-West Germanic *skard, from Proto-Germanic *skardą (“notch; nick”), from *skardaz (“damaged; nicked; scarred”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”). Akin to Scots schaird (“shard”), French écharde (“splinter”), Dutch schaarde (“tear; notch; fragment”), German Scharte (“notch”), Old Norse skarð (“notch, hack”) ( > Danish skår).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).