fragmented

1. 1
   adjective

   Broken apart into fragments, so the original whole no longer holds together.

   Like a jigsaw puzzle knocked apart into scattered pieces.

   The archaeologists recovered a fragmented skull from the burial site.

   Years of erosion left the cliff face fragmented and unstable.

   Similarbroken, shattered, fractured, disintegrated

   Oppositeintact, whole, unbroken, complete

   Note

   Unlike the bare participle, the adjective takes degrees. A landscape can be more fragmented than it was, and one record the most fragmented of all. That gives the quickest test when the form follows be: if very or more fits, the word describes a state rather than reporting the act of breaking.

   The habitat is more fragmented now than it was a decade ago.

   Of all the manuscripts, this one is the most fragmented.

2. 2
   adjective

   Made up of fragments rather than forming a single continuous whole.

   Like a patchwork quilt sewn from scraps of different cloth.

   The novel has a fragmented structure, assembled from diary entries and letters.

   Memory of that night came back fragmented, a few disconnected images.

   Similardisjointed, disconnected, piecemeal, patchy, episodic

   Oppositecoherent, unified, continuous, seamless

   Note

   Here nothing needs to have been broken. The thing was put together from pieces, or it never fully cohered in the first place, like a novel built from letters or a memory that returns in scraps. Where the "broken" meaning looks back to a whole that was lost, this one describes how something is made.

3. 3
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of fragment.

   Years of conflict fragmented the once-unified party.

   The signal fragmented as the storm interfered with the broadcast.

   Note

   Both halves of the verb meet in this one form. A force can fragment something (years of conflict fragmented the party), or a thing can simply fragment on its own (the signal fragmented). Computing keeps a specialist use: a file fragmented across non-contiguous areas of a disk. After be, the participle shades into the adjective for broken things, and only context separates the act from the resulting state.

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