building block vs shard

building block

noun
  • A component that is part of a larger construction, such as a brick or a stone. 

  • A block made of wood or plastic that is used as a children's toy and can be stacked or joined to form a larger structure. 

  • A component that is part of a larger system. 

shard

noun
  • A piece of material, especially rock and similar materials, reminding of a broken piece of glass or pottery. 

  • An instance of an MMORPG that is one of several independent and structurally identical virtual worlds, none of which has so many players as to exhaust a system's resources. 

  • A piece of crystal methamphetamine. 

  • A component of a sharded distributed database. 

  • The plant chard. 

  • A tough scale, sheath, or shell; especially an elytron of a beetle. 

  • A piece of broken glass or pottery, especially one found in an archaeological dig. 

verb
  • To break (something) into shards. 

  • To fall apart into shards, usually as the result of impact or explosion. 

  • To divide (an MMORPG) into several shards, or to establish a shard of one. 

How often have the words building block and shard occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )