Escalate

How to spell escalate

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce escalate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does escalate mean?

1. verbTo increase rapidly in intensity, scale, or seriousness, or to make something do so.

Escalate in a sentence

• The dispute between the two departments began to escalate after the meeting.

• Managers were told to escalate any complaint they could not resolve within an hour.

Where does escalate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a back-formation from 'escalator', the moving staircase whose name was coined around 1900 as a trademark by the Otis Elevator Company. That trade name was built on the Latin scala, meaning 'ladder' or 'staircase', which is itself related to scandere, 'to climb'. Once 'escalator' was familiar, English speakers carved the verb 'escalate' out of it, at first literally meaning to ride or climb such a staircase. By the 1950s, in the tense vocabulary of the Cold War, it took on its now dominant sense of climbing rapidly to a higher and more intense level, as conflicts or costs were said to 'escalate'. The image of mounting steps is a useful spelling reminder: the word keeps the 'sca' of scala and ends in the plain verb suffix -ate.

How the word is built

• escal- (from Latin scala: ladder, staircase)
• -ate (verb suffix)