shard
/ʃaːd/
"shard" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“shard” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #29,083 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #29,083
- frequency rank, English
- 5
- letters
- 8
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | shard |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ʃaːd/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #29,083 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “shard” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for shard is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃaːd/. Corpus data places it at rank #29,083 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 8 likely wrong-spelling variants for shard, with forms such as "hsard", "sahrd", and "shadr". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "star", "shed", "shaw", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Etymologically, the entry records: 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… The correct English form is shard, spelled S-H-A-R-D.
Definition
- 1A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
- 2A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
- 3A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
- 4An 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.
- 5A component of a sharded distributed database.
- 6A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
Etymology
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). The database sense is perhaps derived from the online gaming sense or from SHARD (System for Highly Available Replicated Data), name of a 1980s database product.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hsard,sahrd,shadr,shardd,sharrd,shhard,shrad,sshard
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of shard - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “shard”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-H-A-R-D - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ʃaːd/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “star” - see the side-by-side comparison. shard vs star
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.