shard
shard Lexical Profile
shard Game Scores & Validity
• noun
A sharp, jagged piece of a brittle substance such as glass, ceramic, pottery, or metal.
"The archaeologist carefully brushed the soil away from a painted clay shard."
A horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine, stored on a separate server instance to spread load and improve performance.
"When user traffic surged, the engineering team distributed the customer records across multiple database shards."
• verb
To divide a large database or network into smaller, faster, and more easily managed horizontal partitions (in computing).
"The architects decided to shard the database by geographic region to reduce query latency."
• Rhymes for shard
Word Origin & Etymology
From Old English sceard, meaning a notch, gap, or broken piece, derived from the Proto-Germanic root *skardaz ('cut' or 'notched') and related to the verb shear.