Other forms: fragments, fragmented, fragmenting
A fragment is a small piece broken off a whole. Sharp edges, and not much use on its own.
Archaeology lives on them, since most of what survives from the ancient world is fragments, and a fragment of a poem may be all that is left of a poet. Grammar has the sentence fragment, meaning an incomplete sentence, which is a fault in an essay and a technique in fiction. The verb, stressed on the second syllable, means to break into pieces, and fragmented describes anything divided into parts that no longer work together.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰreg-
Middle English
fragment
English, today
fragment
From Middle English fragment. From Late Middle English fragment, from Latin fragmentum (“a fragment, remnant”), from frangō + mentum.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA