Upscale

How to spell upscale

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce upscale

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does upscale mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to or aimed at affluent customers; expensive, high-end, and stylish.
2. verbTo raise something to a higher level, resolution, or quality.

Upscale in a sentence

• adjective

  They booked a table at an upscale restaurant for the anniversary dinner.

• verb

  The software can upscale an old photo to a sharper resolution.

• adjective

  The agency markets upscale apartments to wealthy professionals.

• verb

  The firm plans to upscale its product range to attract richer clients.

Where does upscale come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern American coinage from the middle of the twentieth century, formed simply by joining the everyday adverb 'up' to the noun 'scale'. The 'scale' element traces back through Old French to the Latin scala, which literally meant a ladder or flight of steps, and which gave English the idea of a graded series of values or levels. By the 1960s marketers in the United States were talking about moving customers or products further up a social and economic scale, and 'upscale' settled in as a tidy adjective for goods, neighbourhoods, and tastes aimed at the affluent end of that range. The same scala root sits behind familiar relatives such as 'escalate' and 'escalator', all sharing the notion of climbing higher. A second, more technical use grew up later in computing and broadcasting, where to upscale an image or signal is to raise it to a higher resolution, again pushing it up the scale of quality.

How the word is built

• up- (upward, higher)
• scale (level or grade, from Latin scala: ladder, steps)