fragment
n. countablen. a small piece that has broken off from something larger. It is usually sharp or uneven, like a piece of a broken plate.
n. a small part broken off or detached from a complete structure. Often used to describe physical debris or incomplete segments of data or text.
The police found a fragment of glass on the floor.
Archaeologists carefully brushed away the dirt to reveal a tiny pottery fragment from the Roman era.
The hard drive was so badly damaged that the technicians could only recover a single fragment of the original encrypted file, leaving the rest of the data lost.
From Late Middle English fragment, from Latin fragmentum (“a fragment, remnant”), from frangō (“to break”) + -mentum.
Commonly followed by the preposition 'of' to indicate the source material.