fragment

plural fragments

1. A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part, either physically or not.

   a fragment of an ancient writing

   2 more examples

   I heard a small fragment of the conversation.

   […]and two enormous Scottish poems, the Buik of Alexander, which has been improbably ascribed to Barbour, and Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of Alexander the Conquerour; one nearly complete Prose Life of Alexander and fragments of four others; a stanzaic translation of the Fuerres de Gadres which survives only in a fragment, the Romance of Cassamus, and three separate translations of the Secreta Secretorum.

   2012, William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur, University of California Press, page 68

   Synonyms: chip, lump, bit, chip, chunk, tranche, clip, crumb

2. grammarA sentence not containing a subject or a predicate; a sentence fragment.
3. computingAn incomplete portion of code.
4. InternetA portion of a URL referring to a subordinate resource or anchor (such as a specific point on a web page), introduced by the # sign.

   The URL www.example.com/home#recent ends with a fragment.

   1 more example

   Unique URLs requires you to make like an information architect and do some URL design work. Possibly, you'll be controlling only the fragment identifier rather than the entire URL, but even the fragment identifier has usability implications.

   2006, Michael Mahemoff, Ajax Design Patterns, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 523

5. biologyA split piece of an organism that has undergone the asexual reproduction process where the organism splits into one or more pieces, then those pieces become new individuals.

present singular third person fragments · participle present fragmenting · participle past fragmented · past fragmented

1. intransitiveTo break apart.

   Once the centralized power of Rome fragmented, economic, social and political power simplified and relocalized.

   2023 July 31, Charles Hugh Smith, Lessons from the Unraveling of the Roman Empire: Simplification, Localization

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   An investigation found that the rail had fragmented as trains passed over it, and that the likely cause was "rolling contact fatigue" defined as multiple surface-breaking cracks. Repeated high loading had caused fatigue cracks to grow, resulting in what is called gauge corner cracking.

   2026 March 18, Peter Plisner, “Tackling broken rails: the skills and technology improving safety”, in RAIL, number 1057, page 30

2. transitiveTo cause to be broken into pieces.

   Samois includes celebate ^([sic]), heterosexual and bisexual women as well as lesbians, and I feel very strongly that this is the wisest choice. Our community is so fragile that we can't afford to fragment it by excommunicating non-lesbian women.

   1982 December 18, Pat Califa, “Open Policy”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 22, page 5

3. transitivecomputingTo break up and disperse (a file) into non-contiguous areas of a disk.
4. intransitivebiologyOf an organism: to undergo the asexual reproduction process where an organism splits into one or more pieces, then those pieces become new individuals.