Sherds

noun

1. A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig.
2. (by extension) A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery.
3. A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle.
4. 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.
5. A component of a sharded distributed database.