fragment

noun

1. A part broken off; a small, detached portion; an imperfect part, either physically or not.

   “a fragment of an ancient writing”

   “I heard a small fragment of the conversation.”

   “[…]and two enormous Scottish poems, the Buik of Alexander, which has been improbably ascribed to Barbour, and Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of Alexander the Conquerour; one nearly complete Prose Life of Alexander and fragments of four others; a stanzaic translation of the Fuerres de Gadres which survives only in a fragment, the Romance of Cassamus, and three separate translations of the Secreta Secretorum.”

2. A sentence not containing a subject or a predicate; a sentence fragment.
3. An incomplete portion of code.
4. (Internet)A portion of a URL referring to a subordinate resource or anchor (such as a specific point on a web page), introduced by the # sign.

   “The URL www.example.com/home#recent ends with a fragment.”

   “Unique URLs requires you to make like an information architect and do some URL design work. Possibly, you'll be controlling only the fragment identifier rather than the entire URL, but even the fragment identifier has usability implications.”

5. A split piece of an organism that has undergone the asexual reproduction process where the organism splits into one or more pieces, then those pieces become new individuals.

verb

1. (intransitive)To break apart.

   “Once the centralized power of Rome fragmented, economic, social and political power simplified and relocalized.”

   “An investigation found that the rail had fragmented as trains passed over it, and that the likely cause was "rolling contact fatigue" defined as multiple surface-breaking cracks. Repeated high loading had caused fatigue cracks to grow, resulting in what is called gauge corner cracking.”

2. (transitive)To cause to be broken into pieces.

   “Samois includes celebate ^([sic]), heterosexual and bisexual women as well as lesbians, and I feel very strongly that this is the wisest choice. Our community is so fragile that we can't afford to fragment it by excommunicating non-lesbian women.”

3. (transitive)To break up and disperse (a file) into non-contiguous areas of a disk.
4. (intransitive)Of an organism: to undergo the asexual reproduction process where an organism spilts into one or more pieces, then those pieces become new individuals.