Scaled

How to spell scaled

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scaled

What does scaled mean?

1. verbClimbed up or over something steep or high.
2. verbAdjusted something in size or proportion, larger or smaller.
3. verbRemoved the small flat plates from the skin of a fish.

Scaled in a sentence

• The burglars scaled the back fence to reach the garden.

• The designer scaled the logo down so it fit the business card.

• The fishmonger scaled and filleted the salmon for us.

• The team scaled the rock face before the storm arrived.

• We scaled the recipe up to feed twenty guests.

• He scaled the trout over the sink before frying it.

Where does scaled come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The verb scale gathers together several old strands that all converged on the same spelling. The sense of climbing comes from the Latin scala, meaning a ladder or flight of steps, which itself grew from scandere, 'to climb', so to scale a wall was literally to ladder your way up it. The sense of measured proportion also traces to scala, since a graded ladder of marks became a 'scale' of values, and from that we get scaling a drawing up or down. A quite separate strand, the scales on a fish, came through Old French escale, 'husk' or 'shell', of Germanic origin, while the weighing scales descend from the Old Norse skal, 'bowl' or 'drinking cup'. By the time these all settled into English, roughly between the 1300s and 1500s, they shared one tidy spelling, and the past tense was formed simply by adding -ed. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the only thing a writer has to remember is that the silent magic e of scale is kept before the ending.

How the word is built

• scale (from Latin scala: ladder, steps, hence a graded series)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)