Other forms: shattered, shattering, shatters
To shatter is to break all at once into pieces too small to glue back together. A dropped glass on a tiled floor, a windscreen after a stone hits it at speed.
It works with an object and without one: the stone shattered the window, and the window shattered. Beyond glass it is the word for hopes, nerves, confidence and quiet - the news shattered her, a scream shattered the silence of the ward. In British speech shattered also means completely exhausted, so 'I'm shattered' is what you say after a double shift, and it means devastated as well, which is why context matters. Shattering as an adjective means overwhelming: shattering news. Note how far it sits from break: shatter promises many pieces, all at once, and a noise.
1verbshatterTo break suddenly into many small pieces.~82%
“The mug shattered on the kitchen floor.”
2verbwreckTo destroy hopes, confidence or calm completely.~16%
“The result shattered his confidence for the rest of the season.”
synonyms: wreck, devastate
3adjectiveexhaustedCompletely exhausted, in the form shattered (British, informal).~2%
“After the drive back she was shattered and went straight to bed.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: smash
Shatter and scatter are the same old word, arrived twice. Middle English schateren, 'to scatter, dash', is a reshaped form of scateren, from Old English scaterian and Proto-Germanic *skat-, 'to smash, scatter'. The root may simply be the sound of the thing happening.
Proto-Germanic
*skat- — to smash, scatter
Old English
scaterian
Middle English
schateren — to scatter, dash
English, today
shatter
From Middle English schateren (“to scatter, dash”), an assibilated form of Middle English scateren "to scatter"; see scatter, from Old English scaterian, from Proto-Germanic skat- (“to smash, scatter”), perhaps ultimately imitative of the sound. Cognate with Dutch schateren (“to burst out laughing”), Low German schateren, Albanian shkatërroj (“to destroy, devastate”). a doublet of scatter.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA