Some 16th-century Italian clergymen tried to ban coffee because they believed it to be “satanic.” However, Pope Clement VII loved coffee so much that he lifted the ban and had coffee baptized in 1600.
SHARD
shard, sherd, fragment
(noun) a broken piece of a brittle artifact
Source: WordNet® 3.1
Etymology 1
Noun
shard (plural shards)
A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
Synonym: potsherd
(by extension) A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
Synonym: splinter
A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
(online gaming) 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.
(databases) A component of a sharded distributed database.
Synonym: partition
(slang, singular or plural) A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
Verb
shard (third-person singular simple present shards, present participle sharding, simple past and past participle sharded)
(intransitive) To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
(transitive) To break (something) into shards.
(online gaming, transitive) To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.
Etymology 2
Noun
shard (uncountable)
The plant chard.
Anagrams
• Dhars, Hards, hards
Source: Wiktionary
Shard, n.
Definition: A plant; chard. [Obs.] Dryden.
Shard, n. Etym: [AS. sceard, properly a p. p. from the root of scearn to shear, to cut; akin to D. schaard a fragment, G. scharte a notch, Icel. skar. See Shear, and cf. Sherd.] [Written also sheard, and sherd.]
1. A piece or fragment of an earthen vessel, or a like brittle substance, as the shell of an egg or snail. Shak. The precious dish Broke into shards of beauty on the board. E. Arnold.
2. (Zoöl.)
Definition: The hard wing case of a beetle. They are his shards, and he their beetle. Shak.
3. A gap in a fence. [Obs.] Stanyhurst.
4. A boundary; a division. [Obs. & R.] Spenser.
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition
Recent Word Finds
Word of the Day
24 December 2024
INTUITIVELY
(adverb) in an intuitive manner; “inventors seem to have chosen intuitively a combination of explosive and aggressive sounds as warning signals to be used on automobiles”
Coffee Trivia
