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
Cite this Entry
“Fragmented.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fragmented. Accessed 1 Aug. 2026.
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