Other forms: pieces
A piece is a part of something bigger — a piece of bread, a piece of paper, a piece of advice. English uses it constantly to make uncountable things countable, which is why you cannot ask for a bread but can always ask for a piece of it.
It is also one object of a set: a chess piece, a piece of furniture, a piece for solo piano. Two phrases are worth knowing early. A piece of cake means easy, said lightly. And to go to pieces or fall to pieces is what a person does when they stop coping.
1nounpartA part of something, or one of the bits something breaks into.~30%
“Would you like a piece of cake?”
2nounpieceOne of the figures moved about in a game.~10%
“He lost three pieces in as many moves.”
3nounworkOne work of music, writing or art.~60%
“She played a short piece by Chopin.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Piece came through Old French from Latin pettia, a fragment or a parcel of land, and probably from Celtic before that. It was a portion broken off long before it was a chess piece.
Proto-Celtic
*kʷezdis — piece, portion, quota
cel-gau
*pettyā
Latin
pettia
Old French
piece
Middle English
pece
English, today
piece
Built from
From Middle English pece, peece, peice, from Old French piece, from Latin pettia, pettia (“broken piece, fragment; parcel of land”), of unknown origin. Possibly ultimately from cel-gau pettyā, from Proto-Celtic kʷezdis (“piece, portion, quota”). Compare Welsh peth (“thing, stuff, junk”), Breton pez (“thing”), Irish cuid (“part, portion”). Compare French pièce, Portuguese peça, Spanish pieza, Italian pezza, Italian pezzo. Displaced native sticche, stucche (“piece, fragment”) from styċċe, whence also styca.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA