Fragmentation

How to spell fragmentation

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce fragmentation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fragmentation mean?

1. nounThe process of breaking or being broken into separate, smaller parts.
2. nounThe scattering of a file's data across non-contiguous areas of a storage drive, which slows access.

Fragmentation in a sentence

• The report blamed the political fragmentation of the region for the slow recovery.

• Disk fragmentation was making the old laptop painfully slow to open large files.

• Poor planning led to the fragmentation of the once-unified company into rival divisions.

• The maintenance tool measured the level of fragmentation before running a clean-up.

Where does fragmentation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on 'fragment', which English borrowed in the late 1400s from the Latin fragmentum, meaning 'a piece broken off'. That noun came directly from the verb frangere, 'to break', the same root that gives us 'fracture', 'fraction', and 'fragile'. The longer form 'fragmentation' was assembled later, in the early nineteenth century, by adding the Latin-derived suffix -ation, which turns a thing into the name of a process: literally 'the act of breaking into fragments'. The word kept the hard 'g' and the silent-feeling vowel cluster of its Latin parent, and that '-mentation' tail, where an unstressed schwa hides between the 'm' and the 't', is exactly where careless writers drop or swap a letter. In the twentieth century it picked up specialised uses in computing and biology, but in every case it still means the same thing the Romans described: something whole coming apart into pieces.

How the word is built

• fragment (from Latin fragmentum: a piece broken off)
• -ation (noun suffix: process or result of an action)