# shard

> English word · Noun · IPA /ʃaːd/ · frequency rank #29,083

## Definitions
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 tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
4. 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.
5. A component of a sharded distributed database.
6. A 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.

## Easily confused with
- **star** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-star)
- **shed** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shed)
- **shaw** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shaw)
- **Shri** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shri)
- **soar** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-soar)
- **shay** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shay)
- **spar** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-spar)
- **shat** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shat)
- **start** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-start)
- **short** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-short)
- **share** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-share)
- **stand** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-stand)
- **stars** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-stars)
- **smart** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-smart)
- **shirt** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shirt)
- **sharp** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-sharp)
- **sword** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-sword)
- **shore** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-shore)
- **spare** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-spare)
- **she'd** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/shard-vs-she-d)

## Common misspellings (8)
`hsard`, `sahrd`, `shadr`, `shardd`, `sharrd`, `shhard`, `shrad`, `sshard`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/shard