scale

/skeɪl/

#1,751 of the most-used English words

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.
   "Please rate your experience on a scale from 1 to 10."
3. Size; scope.
   "The Holocaust was insanity on an enormous scale."
4. The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance.
   "This map uses a scale of 1:10."

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.
   "We should scale that up by a factor of 10."
2. To climb to the top of.
   "Hilary and Norgay were the first known to have scaled Everest."
3. To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
   "That architecture won't scale to real-world environments."
4. To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.

noun

1. 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.
2. A small piece of pigmented chitin, many of which coat the wings of a butterfly or moth to give them their color.
3. A flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis.
4. 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 remove the scales of.
   "Please scale that fish for dinner."
2. To become scaly; to produce or develop scales.
   "The dry weather is making my skin scale."
3. To strip or clear of scale; to descale.
   "to scale the inside of a boiler"
4. To take off in thin layers or scales, as tartar from the teeth; to pare off, as a surface.

Similar: descale