Dictionaries › English

scale

Pronunciation: /skeɪl/

The English word “scale” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending.
  2. An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement; means of assigning a magnitude.
  3. Size; scope.
  4. The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance.
  5. A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced.
  6. A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies.
  7. A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix.
  8. Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order.
  9. A standard amount of money to be paid for a service, for example union-negotiated amounts received by a performer or writer; similar to wage scale or pay grade.
  10. Part of an overlapping arrangement of many small, flat and hard pieces of keratin covering the skin of an animal, particularly a fish or reptile.
  11. A small piece of pigmented chitin, many of which coat the wings of a butterfly or moth to give them their color.
  12. A flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis.
  13. Part of an overlapping arrangement of many small, flat and hard protective layers forming a pinecone that flare when mature to release pine nut seeds.

verb

  1. To change the size of something whilst maintaining proportion; especially to change a process in order to produce much larger amounts of the final product.
  2. To climb to the top of.
  3. To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
  4. To handle heavily increasing loads without breaking down.
  5. To increase revenues exponentially without proportional increases in costs.
  6. To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.
  7. To take measurements from (an engineering drawing), treating them as (or as if) reliable dimensional instructions.

Etymology

From Middle English scale, from Latin scāla, usually in plural scālae (“a flight of steps, stairs, staircase, ladder”), for *skand-slā, from scandō (“to climb”); see scan, ascend, descend, etc. Doublet of scala.

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “scale” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.