Documentation/public-inbox-v2-format.pod | 10 +++++-----
 Documentation/public-inbox-xcpdb.pod     | 11 +++++------

diff --git a/Documentation/public-inbox-v2-format.pod b/Documentation/public-inbox-v2-format.pod
index bdfe7abcd5f990b0fea07d25f9fd1b6f0e5bee70..28d3550cc3fc091b5c1978290bece59568a508f5 100644
--- a/Documentation/public-inbox-v2-format.pod
+++ b/Documentation/public-inbox-v2-format.pod
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
 The key change in v2 is the inbox is no longer a bare git
 repository, but a directory with two or more git repositories.
 v2 divides git repositories by time "epochs" and Xapian
-databases for parallelism by "partitions".
+databases for parallelism by "shards".
 
 =head2 INBOX OVERVIEW AND DEFINITIONS
 
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ foo/ # assuming "foo" is the name of the list
 - inbox.lock                 # lock file (flock) to protect global state
 - git/$EPOCH.git             # normal git repositories
 - all.git                    # empty git repo, alternates to git/$EPOCH.git
-- xap$SCHEMA_VERSION/$PART   # per-partition Xapian DB
+- xap$SCHEMA_VERSION/$SHARD  # per-shard Xapian DB
 - xap$SCHEMA_VERSION/over.sqlite3 # OVER-view DB for NNTP and threading
 - msgmap.sqlite3             # same the v1 msgmap
 
@@ -95,16 +95,16 @@ are documented at:
 
 L<https://public-inbox.org/meta/20180209205140.GA11047@dcvr/>
 
-=head2 XAPIAN PARTITIONS
+=head2 XAPIAN SHARDS
 
 Another second scalability problem in v1 was the inability to
 utilize multiple CPU cores for Xapian indexing.  This is
-addressed by using partitions in Xapian to perform import
+addressed by using shards in Xapian to perform import
 indexing in parallel.
 
 As with git alternates, Xapian natively supports a read-only
 interface which transparently abstracts away the knowledge of
-multiple partitions.  This allows us to simplify our read-only
+multiple shards.  This allows us to simplify our read-only
 code paths.
 
 The performance of the storage device is now the bottleneck on
diff --git a/Documentation/public-inbox-xcpdb.pod b/Documentation/public-inbox-xcpdb.pod
index fd8770a43195c4c05d3b3449acc03305ca8c8c54..a13c4efa7bedc41427041cb552afe4c77092d351 100644
--- a/Documentation/public-inbox-xcpdb.pod
+++ b/Documentation/public-inbox-xcpdb.pod
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
 =item --compact
 
 In addition to performing the copy operation, run L<xapian-compact(1)>
-on each Xapian partition after copying but before finalizing it.
+on each Xapian shard after copying but before finalizing it.
 Compared to the cost of copying a Xapian database, compacting a
 Xapian database takes only around 5% of the time required to copy.
 
@@ -32,14 +32,13 @@ the compaction to take hours at-a-time.
 
 =item --reshard=N / -R N
 
-Repartition the Xapian database on a L<v2|public-inbox-v2-format(5)>
-inbox to C<N> partitions.  Since L<xapian-compact(1)> is not suitable
-for merging, users can rely on this switch to repartition the
+Reshard the Xapian database on a L<v2|public-inbox-v2-format(5)>
+inbox to C<N> shards .  Since L<xapian-compact(1)> is not suitable
+for merging, users can rely on this switch to reshard the
 existing Xapian database(s) to any positive value of C<N>.
 
 This is useful in case the Xapian DB was created with too few or
-too many partitions given the capabilities of the current
-hardware.
+too many shards given the capabilities of the current hardware.
 
 =item --blocksize / --no-full / --fuller