Splinter

How to spell splinter

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce splinter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does splinter mean?

1. nounA small, thin, sharp fragment of wood, glass, or similar material broken off a larger piece.
2. verbTo break or cause to break into thin, sharp fragments.
3. adjectiveDescribing a small faction that has broken away from a larger organisation or party.

Splinter in a sentence

• noun

  She pulled a tiny splinter from her thumb with tweezers.

• verb

  Cheap plywood tends to splinter when you drill into it.

• adjective

  A splinter group left the party to form their own movement.

• noun

  A splinter of glass had lodged in the sole of his shoe.

• verb

  The dropped vase will splinter across the tiled floor.

• adjective

  The union split when a splinter faction rejected the deal.

Where does splinter come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Splinter entered English in the late 1300s from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German splinter, meaning a thin sliver or fragment, and it is closely tied to the related word splint. The whole family goes back to a Germanic root meaning to split or to cleave apart, the same idea preserved in the modern verb split. From its earliest use the word described the small sharp shards that fly off when wood or stone is broken, and that concrete sense has stayed remarkably stable for over six hundred years. By extension it later came to describe a small group breaking away from a larger one, as in a splinter group breaking off from a political party. The spelling keeps the tidy consonant cluster spl- at the front and the plain -er ending, so the main thing to remember is the single t in the middle rather than a doubled one.

How the word is built

• splint (thin piece of wood)
• -er (noun/diminutive suffix)