Other forms: splintered, splinters, splintering
A splinter is a thin sharp piece broken off something hard, and the one you meet first is the one in your finger. You run your hand along an old fence or a wooden bench and there it is — a dark line under the skin, too small to grip and impossible to ignore.
Wood produces most of them, but glass, bone and metal splinter too, and the word covers the piece and the breaking both: splintered glass across the pavement, the bat splintered on impact. Tweezers and a sterilised needle are the standard cure. Away from workshops, splinter describes a group breaking into smaller unfriendly pieces — a party splinters, and the piece that walks out is a splinter group. The adjective splintered carries that same picture of something once whole and now in sharp fragments: a splintered opposition, a splintered family.
1nounsplinterA thin sharp piece broken off wood, glass or bone, especially one stuck in the skin.
“She got a splinter in her thumb from the old handrail.”
2verbbreakTo break into thin sharp pieces.
“The door splintered under the weight of the axe.”
3verbfragment(of a group) to break up into smaller opposing parts.
“The movement splintered into half a dozen small factions.”
Splinter came into Middle English from Middle Dutch splinter, and it is splint plus -er — the same splint that names the flat piece of wood strapped to a broken finger. So a splinter is, by construction, a little splint: long, thin and flat is built into the word.
Middle Dutch
splinter
Middle English
splenter
English, today
splinter
From Middle English splenter, splinter, from Middle Dutch splinter, equivalent to splint + er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA