fragment

Etymology

From Late Middle English fragment, from Latin fragmentum (“a fragment, remnant”).

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. 2012, William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur, University of California Press, page 68
2. (grammar) A sentence not containing a subject or a predicate.
3. (computing) 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.
   Holonym: anchor link
   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. 2006, Michael Mahemoff, Ajax Design Patterns, O'Reilly Media, page 523

verb

1. (intransitive) To break apart.
   Once the centralized power of Rome fragmented, economic, social and political power simplified and relocalized. July 31, 2023, Charles Hugh Smith, Lessons from the Unraveling of the Roman Empire: Simplification, Localization
2. (transitive) To cause to be broken into pieces.
3. (transitive, computing) To break up and disperse (a file) into non-contiguous areas of a disk.