Meaning

• A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.

• (by extension) A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.

• A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.

• 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.

• A component of a sharded distributed database.

• (singular or plural) A piece of crystal methamphetamine.

Meaning

• To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.

• To break (something) into shards.

• To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.