Scale

How to spell scale

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scale

What does scale mean?

1. nounThe relative size, extent, or proportion of something, often shown as a ratio.
2. nounA device used to weigh objects or people.
3. nounAn ordered sequence of musical notes rising or falling in pitch.
4. verbTo climb up or over something steep or high.
5. nounOne of the small thin plates covering the skin of fish and reptiles.

Scale in a sentence

• noun

  The map was drawn to a scale of one to fifty thousand.

• noun

  She stepped on the bathroom scale to check her weight.

• noun

  The piano student practised a C major scale every morning.

• verb

  The climbers planned to scale the north face of the mountain.

• noun

  A single scale glinted on the cook's knife as she cleaned the fish.

• noun

  The company expanded its operation on a national scale.

Where does scale come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This single English spelling actually pulls together three separate ancestors that happened to land on the same form. The most influential is Latin scala, meaning a 'ladder' or 'flight of steps', which itself came from scandere 'to climb'; from this came the senses of climbing, of a graduated measuring line (like the rungs of a ladder), and of relative size or proportion. The weighing sense, as in a set of scales, arrived separately from Old Norse skal, meaning a 'bowl' or 'drinking cup', because the pans that held the goods were shaped like shallow bowls. The thin plates covering a fish or reptile came by yet another route, from Old French escale, meaning a 'husk' or 'shell', of Germanic origin. Because all three streams collapsed into one short word, English ended up with a single spelling carrying strikingly different meanings, which is why context, not spelling, is what tells them apart.

How the word is built

• scal- (root, from Latin scala 'ladder, steps')
• -e