| scale | |
| 1. n. (obsolete) A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending. | |
| 2. n. An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement, means of assigning a magnitude. | |
| Please rate your experience on a scale from 1 to 10. | |
| The magnitude of an earthquake is measured on the open-ended Richter scale. | |
| 3. n. Size; scope. | |
| The Holocaust was insanity on an enormous scale. | |
| There are some who question the scale of our ambitions. | |
| 4. n. The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance. | |
| This map uses a scale of 1:10. | |
| 5. n. A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced | |
| 6. n. (music) A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies. | |
| 7. n. A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix. | |
| the decimal scale; the binary scale | |
| 8. n. Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order. | |
| 9. n. A standard amount of money to be received by a performer or writer, negotiated by a union. | |
| Sally wasn't the star of the show, so she was glad to be paid scale. | |
| 10. v. 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. | |
| 11. v. To climb to the top of. | |
| Hilary and Norgay were the first known to have scaled Everest. | |
| 12. v. (intransitive, computing) To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors. | |
| That architecture won't scale to real-world environments. | |
| 13. v. To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system. | |
| 14. n. 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. | |
| 15. n. A small piece of pigmented chitin, many of which coat the wings of a butterfly or moth to give them their color. | |
| 16. n. A flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis. | |
| 17. n. 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. | |
| 18. n. The flaky material sloughed off heated metal. | |
| 19. n. Scale mail (as opposed to chain mail). | |
| 20. n. Limescale. | |
| 21. n. A scale insect. | |
| 22. n. The thin metallic side plate of the handle of a pocketknife. | |
| 23. v. To remove the scales of. | |
| Please scale that fish for dinner. | |
| 24. v. (intransitive) To become scaly; to produce or develop scales. | |
| The dry weather is making my skin scale. | |
| 25. v. To strip or clear of scale; to descale. | |
| to scale the inside of a boiler | |
| 26. v. To take off in thin layers or scales, as tartar from the teeth; to pare off, as a surface. | |
| 27. v. (intransitive) To separate and come off in thin layers or laminae. | |
| Some sandstone scales by exposure. | |
| 28. v. (Scotland) To scatter; to spread. | |
| 29. v. To clean, as the inside of a cannon, by the explosion of a small quantity of powder. | |
| 30. n. A device to measure mass or weight. | |
| After the long, lazy winter I was afraid to get on the scale. | |
| 31. n. Either of the pans, trays, or dishes of a balance or scales. | |
