Scales

How to spell scales

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scales

What does scales mean?

1. nounAn instrument or machine used to weigh things.
2. nounThe small thin plates covering the skin of fish and reptiles.
3. nounSequences of musical notes played in ascending or descending order.
4. verbClimbs up or over something steep or high.

Scales in a sentence

• noun

  The bathroom scales showed she had lost a little weight.

• noun

  He scraped the silvery scales off the salmon before cooking it.

• noun

  The piano teacher made her practise scales for ten minutes each day.

• verb

  The experienced climber scales the sheer rock face without ropes.

• noun

  The kitchen scales help measure flour and sugar accurately.

• noun

  The snake shed its dry scales in a single piece.

Where does scales come from?

Language of origin: Other

The single spelling 'scales' actually braids together several different roots that happened to end up looking and sounding alike. The weighing sense comes from Old Norse 'skal', meaning a bowl or drinking cup, which gave the sense of the two pans of a balance; it entered English in the medieval period as Norse settlers influenced the language. The 'fish scale' sense arrived separately from Old French 'escale', meaning a husk or shell, which traced back to a Germanic root for something that splits off, like a flake or plate. The musical and measuring senses derive from Latin 'scala', meaning a ladder or flight of steps (the same root behind 'escalate' and 'escalator'), because a musical scale climbs note by note like rungs. By a neat coincidence the climbing verb 'to scale' a wall also comes from that Latin 'scala', so to scale a cliff is literally to ladder up it. Because all these strands collapsed into one plain spelling, the word is rarely misspelt despite its tangled history.

How the word is built

• scale (root)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb)