Other forms: shards
A shard is a sharp broken piece of glass or pottery. A shard of glass, shards on the floor, a pottery shard.
Archaeologists live on them: pottery breaks and does not rot, so shards are the commonest find on almost any site and the style of one dates a layer. The word is Old English and is related to shear and to score, all from cutting.
shard is a fragment.
Old English sceard means a broken piece, from a Germanic root meaning to cut. Shear is a relative.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ker- — to cut
Proto-Germanic
*skardą — notch; nick
Proto-West Germanic
*skard
Old English
sċeard — a broken piece; shard
Middle English
shard
English, today
shard
Built from
From Middle English shard, scherd, scheard, schord, from Old English sċeard (“a broken piece; shard”), from Proto-West Germanic skard, from Proto-Germanic skardą (“notch; nick”), from skardaz (“damaged; nicked; scarred”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“to cut”). Akin to Scots schaird (“shard”), French écharde (“splinter”), Dutch schaarde (“tear; notch; fragment”), German Scharte (“notch”), Old Norse skarð (“notch, hack”) (> Danish skår). The database sense is perhaps derived from the online gaming sense or from SHARD (System for Highly Available Replicated Data), name of a 1980s database product.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA