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

A computer's hard drive becomes more and more fragmented every time a file is saved, a file is deleted or a program is installed.

—Shea Conner

Synonyms of fragmented

• fractured
• broken
• 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

The companies said the collaboration moves the industry beyond fragmented solutions toward a more unified, scalable infrastructure for understanding and optimizing the physical world. —Arthur Zaczkiewicz, Footwear News, 21 Apr. 2026

When these systems are manual or fragmented, the founder becomes the central point through which every decision flows, and that arrangement has a ceiling that growth will eventually expose. —Victoria Chynoweth, Rolling Stone, 20 Apr. 2026

Over the past decade, the media sector has become ever more fragmented, except, perhaps, for sports. —Brian Steinberg, Variety, 20 Apr. 2026

Why Bears Move Into Neighborhoods As natural habitats shrink or become fragmented, black bears are pushed closer to neighborhoods where garbage, pet food and crops are easy to access. —Samantha Agate, Miami Herald, 20 Apr. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1817, in the meaning defined at sense 1