Other forms: scales
Scale is size — how big a thing is once you set it beside everything else. A model railway built to scale, a map where one centimetre stands for a kilometre, a fire that spread on a scale nobody had planned for.
The same five letters cover several different words. Scales are what you stand on to weigh yourself, and a scale is also the row of numbers up the side of a thermometer, or the run of notes a piano student plays over and over. A fish has scales — the small hard plates that overlap down its sides, the ones you scrape off before cooking — and so do snakes, lizards and pine cones. As a verb, you scale a wall, which means climb it, and you scale a plan up or down. Learn large-scale and small-scale with their hyphens, and on a scale of one to ten, which is how English asks you to put a number on a feeling.
1nounsizeThe size of something measured against other things — how big it is, how far it reaches.~30%
“The scale of the damage only became clear at first light.”
2nounscaleOne of the small hard plates covering a fish, a snake or a lizard.~2%
“He scraped the scales off the fish with the back of a knife.”
3nounmarkedA marked row of numbers or steps used for measuring — on a map, a ruler or a thermometer.~66%
“The map has a scale printed in the corner.”
4nounmachineThe machine you weigh things on, almost always called the scales.~2%
“She weighed the flour on the kitchen scales.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: scales
Three separate words landed on one spelling. The measuring one is Latin scāla, a ladder or a flight of steps, from scandō, to climb — which is why you can still scale a wall, and why a scale goes up in steps, musical notes included. The fish one came in through Old French escale from a Germanic word for a shell or a husk. The weighing one is Old Norse skál, a bowl, because a balance weighed things in a pair of hanging bowls.
Middle English
scale
English, today
scale
Built from
From Middle English scale. 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. a doublet of scala.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA