Klryz
Pronunciation guide: IPA symbols, stress and word endings

Vowels

iːseeɪsite / ɛbedæcat
ɑːfatherɒhot (UK)ɔːlawʊput
uːtooʌcupɜːbirdəabout
eɪdayaɪmyɔɪboyaʊnow
əʊ / oʊgo (UK / US)ɪəneareəhairʊətour

Consonants that look unusual

θthinðthisʃsheʒmeasure
tʃchurchdʒjudgeŋsingjyes

p b t d k g f v s z h m n l r w sound as in ordinary English spelling.

Marks

  • ˈ main stress, before the stressed syllable: /ˈwɔːtə/ water · ˌ lighter (secondary) stress: /ˌʌndəˈstænd/ understand
  • ː a long vowel · (r) an r said only in accents that pronounce it (most American, Scottish, Irish)

Common word endings

  • -s / -es (plurals; he/she form of verbs): /s/ after voiceless sounds (cats), /z/ after voiced (dogs), /ɪz/ after s, z, sh, ch, j sounds (buses, watches). Spelling: -es after s, x, z, ch, sh; consonant + y → -ies (city → cities).
  • -ed (past): /t/ after voiceless sounds (walked), /d/ after voiced (played), /ɪd/ after t or d (wanted). Spelling: love → loved, stop → stopped, carry → carried.
  • -ing: make → making, run → running, see → seeing.
  • Irregular: go, went, gone · be, was, been · see, saw, seen · man → men · child → children · mouse → mice.
  • Older (King James) forms: -eth = -s (he loveth = he loves) · -est with “thou” (thou lovest) · spake = spoke.

English Dictionary · 107,383 entries · Sources & licences

shard

UK /ˈʃɑːd/ · US /ˈʃɑɹd/ noun, verb

Forms shards sharding sharded sherd

  1. noun A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
  2. noun (by extension) A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
  3. noun (cooking) A food preparation similar in shape to a shard of, e.g., glass, generally made from a sheet of a hard product that is then shattered to produce smaller pieces. “A shard of chocolate adorns the dish.”
  4. noun A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
  5. noun (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.
  6. noun (databases) A component of a sharded distributed database.
  7. noun (slang, in the singular or in the plural) A piece of crystal methamphetamine.
  8. verb (intransitive) To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion.
  9. verb (transitive) To break (something) into shards.
  10. verb (online gaming, transitive) To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one.
  11. noun The plant chard.

Synonyms

potsherd splinter partition sherd fragment

Etymology

From Middle English shard, scherd, scheard, schord, from Old English sċeard (“a broken piece; shard”), from Proto-West Germanic *skard, from Proto-Germanic *skardą (“notch; nick”), from *skardaz (“damaged; nicked; scarred”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”). Akin to Scots schaird (“shard”), French écharde (“splinter”), Dutch schaarde (“tear; notch; fragment”), German Scharte (“notch”), Old Norse skarð (“notch, hack”) ( > Danish skår).
The database sense is perhaps derived from the online gaming sense or from SHARD (System for Highly Available Replicated Data), name of a 1980s database product.

Webster’s 1913

  1. noun A plant; chard. [Obs.] Dryden.
  2. noun A piece or fragment of an earthen vessel, or a like brittle substance, as the shell of an egg or snail. Shak.
  3. noun The hard wing case of a beetle.

Etymology [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.]

Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “shard”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details