shard

• Shard (also sherd or potsherd), a term for broken pieces of pottery or glass, often used in archaeology. In contemporary use, it often implies a sharp fragment, especially of glass.
• In zoology, a shard is a tough scale, sheath, or shell; it is especially used as a term to refer to the elytra of a beetle.
• SHARD, an acronym for South Hams Against Rural Destruction, a local environmental action group from South Hams, Devon, United Kingdom, active since approximately 1998.
• database sharding is a method for database partitioning

Entertainment

• A Single Shard, children's novel by Linda Sue Park, set in 12th-century Korea, 2002 Newbery Medal winner
• Rex Shard, a convicted murderer in the animated television series SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron

• shard, an instance of a world, realm, or playground in some massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) or in a multiplayer computer role-playing game-style server.
  • In MMOGs, the term shard is often associated with Ultima Online, Neverwinter Nights, and Silkroad Online.
  • Other MMOGs call them servers or Realms (World of Warcraft) instead, although their function is still basically the same.
  • The usage originated with the Ultima Online story, where each of the game's servers were said to be different images of the world, trapped in the shattered shards of a mystic gem (originally conceived in 1980 for Ultima I, this event is mentioned many times throughout the Ultima series).
  • Six games known for using unsharded servers are Mankind (MMORTS), EVE Online, PlanetSide, A Tale in the Desert, Entropia Universe and Anarchy Online where there is no sharding or instancing and everything happens in the same persistent online world. **Second Life, which is a user-content generated world, uses servers called "sims" seamlessly connected to each other in a "grid" to create one persistent world.

• Shard (comics), a fictional character in the Marvel Comics universe. She is the sister of the X-Man named Bishop.
• The Shard of Lightning, 16th episode of animated television series Xiaolin Showdown created by Christy Hui
• Ultima Online shard emulation, fans of Ultima Online have reverse-engineered the game to produce server emulators of the original Electronic Arts servers

Places

• Shard End, an area of Birmingham, England
  • Shard End Lake, a man-made lake in the Shard End area of Birmingham
• Shard London Bridge, a pyramidal skyscraper planned for London, which, if built, might become the tallest building in Britain.

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