fragment
n. · v.-
1 a broken piece (n.) B2 Upper Intermediatea small piece that has broken off from something larger.
a small, detached portion of a physical object or an incomplete part of a non-physical entity.
ExampleThe archaeologists found a small fragment of ancient pottery in the sand.
ExampleThe explosion sent fragments of glass flying across the pavement, though fortunately no pedestrians were in the immediate vicinity.
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2 grammar (n.) C1 Advanced Academic Grammaran incomplete sentence that is missing a subject or a main action.
a group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period but lacks a subject, a predicate, or both.
ExampleThe teacher circled the sentence fragment and asked the student to fix it.
ExampleWhile common in creative writing for stylistic emphasis, sentence fragments are generally discouraged in formal academic essays.
- incomplete sentence
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3 computing (n.) C1 Advanced Technical Computinga small part of a computer file or a specific part of a web address.
an incomplete portion of code or a URL component identifying a specific anchor within a resource.
ExampleThe web link included a fragment that took me directly to the bottom of the page.
ExampleThe developer spent the afternoon debugging a code fragment that was causing the application to crash during the login sequence.
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4 to break apart (v.) B2 Upper Intermediateto break into many small pieces or separate into different groups.
to break or cause to break into small or separate parts; often used figuratively for groups or systems.
ExampleThe political party began to fragment after the leaders disagreed on the new law.
ExampleIf the data is allowed to fragment across the hard drive, the system's overall processing speed will eventually decrease.
From Late Middle English fragment, from Latin fragmentum (“a fragment, remnant”), from frangō (“to break”) + -mentum.
- Nounfragment
- Nounfragmentation
- Adjectivefragmentary