scale
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: business
computing
engineering
entertainment
lifestyle
manufacturing
mathematics
music
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
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.
Inflected forms:
form: scales
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: scales
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: scaling
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: scaled
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: scaled
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
gloss: An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement; means of assigning a magnitude.
pos: noun
examples: Please rate your experience on a scale from 1 to 10.
The magnitude of an earthquake is measured on the open-ended Richter scale.
gloss: Size; scope.
pos: noun
examples: There are some who question the scale of our ambitions.
We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.
gloss: The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance.
pos: noun
examples: This map uses a scale of 1:10.
gloss: A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced.
pos: noun
examples: Even though precision can be carried to an extreme, the scales which now are drawn in (and usually connected to an appropriate figure by an arrow) will allow derivation of meaningful measurements.
gloss: A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies.
pos: noun
gloss: A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix.
pos: noun
examples: the decimal scale, the binary scale
gloss: Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order.
pos: noun
examples: There is a certain scale of duties […] which for want of studying in right order, all the world is in confusion.
City's players and supporters travelled from one end of the emotional scale to the other in those vital seconds, providing a truly remarkable piece of football theatre and the most dramatic conclusion to a season in Premier League history.
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: Sally wasn't the star of the show, so she was glad to be paid scale.
gloss: 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.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: We should scale that up by a factor of 10.
gloss: To climb to the top of.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Hilary and Norgay were the first known to have scaled Everest.
At last I came to the great barrier-cliffs; and after three days of mad effort—of maniacal effort—I scaled them. I built crude ladders; I wedged sticks in narrow fissures; I chopped toe-holds and finger-holds with my long knife; but at last I scaled them. Near the summit I came upon a huge cavern.
A solitary rock is always attractive. All right-minded people feel an overwhelming desire to scale and sit upon it.
The dead leap at the throat, destroy
The meaning of the day; dark forms
Have scaled your walls, and spies betray
Old secrets to amorphous swarms.
gloss: To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: That architecture won't scale to real-world environments.
gloss: To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Scaling his present bearing with his past.
The kitchen-dining-buffet car scales 49.2 tons.
gloss: To take measurements from (an engineering drawing), treating them as (or as if) reliable dimensional instructions.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Every single drawing in the specification has a warning in its title block which reads, "Do not scale this drawing."
Related words: degree
ordinal variable
scaling ladder
Derived words: altered scale
at scale
broadscale
counterscale
diseconomies of scale
economies of scale
eigenscale
exascale
femtoscale
fieldscale
full-scale
gigascale
global-scale
gray-scale
grayscale
greyscale
Gunter's scale
gyroscale
hyperscale
industrial scale
Internet-scale
large-scale
logscale
long scale
macroscale
medium-scale
mesoscale
microscale
midscale
milliscale
miniscale
multiscale
nanoscale
off the scale
overscale
payscale
petascale
picoscale
playscale
Raglan's scale
returns to scale
room-scale
salary scale
scalation
scale bar
scalebound
scale cube
scale degree
scalefree
scale height
scale invariance
scalelength
scale model
scale modeler
scale ruler
scaleup
scalewise
scalic
scalogram
small-scale
subscale
superscale
terascale
thumb on the scale
time scale
timescale
to scale
typescale
ultra large scale integration
upscale
very large scale integration
waferscale
wafer-scale integration
webscale
widescale
wide-scale
scaleback
scaleless
scalelet
scalelike
scalie
scaleproof
scaler
autoscale
blitzscale
downscale
prescale
scale in
rescale
scalability
scalable
unscale
Translations: