A shard is a sharp, broken piece of something brittle, usually glass, pottery, or ceramic. When a mirror falls and breaks, it shatters into dangerous shards with jagged edges. When archaeologists dig up ancient civilizations, they often find pottery shards that help them understand how people lived thousands of years ago.

The word carries a sense of something that was once whole but is now broken. A shard is specifically a fragment with sharp edges from something that broke or shattered. You might find shards of a broken plate on the kitchen floor, or shards of glass from a car window after a crash.

In video games and fantasy stories, shard sometimes means a fragment of something magical or powerful, like a shard of a crystal that once held great power. This usage plays on the idea that even a broken piece of something special still matters. The word reminds us that broken things leave traces: sometimes dangerous ones you need to clean up carefully, and sometimes valuable ones that tell important stories about the past.