shard

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A broken piece or fragment, as of pottery or glass.
• noun Zoology A tough scale or covering, such as the elytron of a beetle.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A piece or fragment, as of an earthen vessel; a potsherd; a fragment of any hard material.
• noun A scale; a shell, as of an egg or a snail.
• noun The wing-cover or elytrum of a beetle.
• noun A notch.
• noun A gap in a fence.
• noun An opening in a wood.
• noun A bourn or boundary; a division.
• noun The leaves of the artichoke and some other vegetables whitened or blanched.
• noun Dung; excrement; ordure.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun obsolete A plant; chard.
• noun A piece or fragment of an earthen vessel, or a like brittle substance, as the shell of an egg or snail.
• noun (Zoöl.) The hard wing case of a beetle.
• noun obsolete A gap in a fence.
• noun Obs. & R. A boundary; a division.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
• noun A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
• noun A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
• noun online role-playing An instance of an MMORPG that is one of several independent and structurally identical virtual worlds, none of which has so many players as to exhaust a system's resources.
• verb intransitive To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
• verb transitive To break (something) into shards.
• verb online role-playing, transitive To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a broken piece of a brittle artifact