fragments

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of fragment.

   Archaeologists carefully labeled the pottery fragments before cataloging them.

   Tiny fragments of bone were scattered across the excavation site.

   Note

   A regular plural, formed with -s, that carries every meaning the singular has. It covers shards of pottery or bone, and also sentence fragments in a grammar lesson, incomplete pieces of code, the parts of a URL after the # sign, and split-off pieces that grow into new organisms. The same spelling also serves as the verb's present-tense form. A word before it, as in the fragments or bone fragments, marks the noun.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of fragment.

   Intense heat fragments the mineral into a fine powder.

   The political party fragments whenever its leaders disagree on strategy.

   Note

   The present-tense form that takes he, she or it as subject, and it works in two directions. Transitively, something breaks a thing apart: heat fragments the mineral. Intransitively, the thing breaks up by itself: the party fragments. Computing uses it for scattering a file across non-contiguous areas of a disk. Biology uses it for an organism that splits into pieces, each becoming a new individual.

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