You're most likely to come across the word smithereens when someone's describing an explosion: "It was such an exciting movie — the spies kept blowing cars to smithereens!" You could also say that a neighborhood vandal smashed both your mailbox and your jack-'o-lantern to smithereens.

How do you use smithereens?

If something is smashed or blown to smithereens, it breaks into very small pieces. She dropped the vase and smashed it to smithereens. They walked right into a booby-trap and got blown to smithereens.

What does the term smithereens mean?

: small broken pieces : fragments, bits the vase was in smithereens on the floor —usually used in phrases like blow to smithereens or smash to smithereens Roughly once a second, a star somewhere in the universe explodes.