fragmented

adjective

frag·​ment·​ed ˈfrag-ˌmen-təd 

1

: broken or separated into distinct parts

Another fragmented language group is the Austroasiatic family, whose most widely spoken languages are Vietnamese and Cambodian.

—Jared Diamond

The reality seems to be that the global audience for movies has become increasingly diverse and fragmented, which runs against Hollywood's obsession with finding that magic common denominator.

—Peter Bart

2

computing : having related or associated pieces of stored data disorganized in a way that makes them more difficult to access

Fragmented files require much more work to read than contiguous files, because to do so DOS must chase down each sector, possibly moving the disk head back and forth many times. Each of these … slows the task at hand and results in additional wear and tear on your hard disk.

—Brett Glass

You probably won't notice a marked performance boost unless your hard drive is extremely fragmented.

—Doug Stanley

Synonyms

• broken
• busted
• fractured
• shattered
• smashed

Examples of fragmented in a Sentence

restoring the fragmented Roman sculpture was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle

Recent Examples on the Web

Such crashes have become more of a feature than a bug in the nation’s fragmented emergency response system. —Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY, 16 July 2024

But even the genomes of its living relatives, the African and Asian elephants, are highly fragmented, since they were done a few years back using a quicker and inexpensive approach. —John Timmer, Ars Technica, 11 July 2024

Although the mood of the predominantly leftwing industry is upbeat over the outcome of these elections, France’s National Assembly has emerged as more fragmented than it’s ever been since the inception of the Fifth Republic by General De Gaulle in 1958. —Elsa Keslassy, Variety, 8 July 2024

In this modern, fragmented era, and with competitors everywhere ranging from the streamers to YouTube to gaming, these bastions of British culture are trying to chart a path forwards. —Max Goldbart, Deadline, 5 July 2024

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1817, in the meaning defined at sense 1