the.com/shard
proof that breaking apart can still leave something dangerously sharp behind
means A sharp fragment broken off from something brittle like glass, pottery, or rock.
from From Old English 'sceard,' meaning a gap, notch, or cut piece — kin to the verb 'shear,' to cut. It belongs to a wide Germanic family (compare Old Norse 'skarð,' a notch or gap), all circling the idea of something cleaved or broken off. For centuries it meant chiefly a broken bit of pottery, and only later spread to glass, stone, and anything else that shatters into edges.
- naming origin
- comes from Old English for a broken piece or gap
- london skyline
- The Shard is Western Europe's tallest building
- computing trick
- databases split into shards to scale horizontally
- glass danger
- shards can be thinner than a human hair
- archaeology gold
- pottery shards date ancient sites with eerie precision
world of warcraft — mmo with multiple parallel server instances called shards, each hosting thousands of players simultaneously
eve online — space mmo with single massive shard called tranquility hosting up to 65,000 concurrent players in one universe
database sharding — technique splitting data across multiple servers; youtube shards user data by id to handle billions of queries daily