fragment
- 01 B2 Upper Intermediate
n.a small piece that has broken off from something larger.
n.a small, detached portion of a physical object or an incomplete part of a non-physical entity.
Simple“The archaeologists found a small fragment of ancient pottery in the sand.”
In context“The explosion sent fragments of glass flying across the pavement, though fortunately no pedestrians were in the immediate vicinity.”
- 02 C1 Advanced
n.an incomplete sentence that is missing a subject or a main action.
n.a group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period but lacks a subject, a predicate, or both.
Simple“The teacher circled the sentence fragment and asked the student to fix it.”
In context“While common in creative writing for stylistic emphasis, sentence fragments are generally discouraged in formal academic essays.”
Synonymsincomplete sentence - 03 C1 Advanced
n.a small part of a computer file or a specific part of a web address.
n.an incomplete portion of code or a URL component identifying a specific anchor within a resource.
Simple“The web link included a fragment that took me directly to the bottom of the page.”
In context“The developer spent the afternoon debugging a code fragment that was causing the application to crash during the login sequence.”
- 04 B2 Upper Intermediate
v.to break into many small pieces or separate into different groups.
v.to break or cause to break into small or separate parts; often used figuratively for groups or systems.
Simple“The political party began to fragment after the leaders disagreed on the new law.”
In context“If the data is allowed to fragment across the hard drive, the system's overall processing speed will eventually decrease.”
Synonyms
Usage small fragment
“You can still see the shapes of epidermal cells in these fossil leaf fragments, and that’s important.”
“A 1,600-year-old mummy discovered in Egypt has revealed something archaeologists had never seen before: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad used during embalming.”
From Late Middle English fragment, from Latin fragmentum (“a fragment, remnant”), from frangō (“to break”) + -mentum.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.