# fragment

/ˈfɹæɡmənt/ (US)

Source: https://englishreference.com/word/fragment
Updated: 2026-06-20

## Senses

### 1. a broken piece

noun · CEFR B2

a small piece that has broken off from something larger.

For teachers: a small, detached portion of a physical object or an incomplete part of a non-physical entity.

- The archaeologists found a small fragment of ancient pottery in the sand.
- The explosion sent fragments of glass flying across the pavement, though fortunately no pedestrians were in the immediate vicinity.

### 2. grammar

noun · CEFR C1 · Academic

an incomplete sentence that is missing a subject or a main action.

For teachers: a group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period but lacks a subject, a predicate, or both.

- The teacher circled the sentence fragment and asked the student to fix it.
- While common in creative writing for stylistic emphasis, sentence fragments are generally discouraged in formal academic essays.

### 3. computing

noun · CEFR C1 · Technical

a small part of a computer file or a specific part of a web address.

For teachers: an incomplete portion of code or a URL component identifying a specific anchor within a resource.

- The web link included a fragment that took me directly to the bottom of the page.
- The developer spent the afternoon debugging a code fragment that was causing the application to crash during the login sequence.

### 4. to break apart

verb · CEFR B2

to break into many small pieces or separate into different groups.

For teachers: to break or cause to break into small or separate parts; often used figuratively for groups or systems.

- The political party began to fragment after the leaders disagreed on the new law.
- If the data is allowed to fragment across the hard drive, the system's overall processing speed will eventually decrease.

## Examples

- 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.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.