scale
IPA: skˈeɪɫ
noun
- (obsolete) A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending.
- An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement; means of assigning a magnitude.
- Size; scope.
- The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance.
- A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced.
- (music) A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies.
- A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix.
- Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order.
- A standard amount of money to be paid for a service, for example union-negotiated amounts received by a performer or writer; similar to wage scale or pay grade.
- Part of an overlapping arrangement of many small, flat and hard pieces of keratin covering the skin of an animal, particularly a fish or reptile.
- A small piece of pigmented chitin, many of which coat the wings of a butterfly or moth to give them their color.
- A flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis.
- Part of an overlapping arrangement of many small, flat and hard protective layers forming a pinecone that flare when mature to release pine nut seeds.
- (uncountable) The flaky material sloughed off heated metal.
- Scale mail (as opposed to chain mail).
- (uncountable) Limescale.
- A scale insect.
- The thin metallic side plate of the handle of a pocketknife.
- (uncountable, US) An infestation of scale insects on a plant; commonly thought of as, or mistaken for, a disease.
- A device to measure mass or weight.
- Either of the pans, trays, or dishes of a balance or scales.
verb
- (transitive) To change the size of something whilst maintaining proportion; especially to change a process in order to produce much larger amounts of the final product.
- (transitive) To climb to the top of.
- (intransitive, computing) To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
- (transitive) To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.
- (manufacturing, transitive) To take measurements from (an engineering drawing), treating them as (or as if) reliable dimensional instructions. This practice often works but can produce latently incorrect results and is thus usually deprecated.
- (transitive) To remove the scales of.
- (intransitive) To become scaly; to produce or develop scales.
- (transitive) To strip or clear of scale; to descale.
- (transitive) To take off in thin layers or scales, as tartar from the teeth; to pare off, as a surface.
- (intransitive) To separate and come off in thin layers or laminae.
- (UK, Scotland, dialect) To scatter; to spread.
- (transitive) To clean, as the inside of a cannon, by the explosion of a small quantity of powder.
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Examples of "scale" in Sentences
- But until then, the pain scale is all we have and should be used for legal purposes.
- Conducting a referendum on this scale is a huge challenge and will take a lot of planning and time - which is rapidly running out.
- The set, smaller in scale, is a progressively decaying wonder that is intact as is La Follie's megalomaniacal attention-grabbing theatrics.
- The other scale is the growing unity of conservatism … not necessarily republicans, but those that want, in summary, for America to remain America … complete with traditional ways of life, values, and morals ….
- However, as I began this part of the argument with, the century time scale is short for chaotic transitions in something as highly inertial as the climate system, and it is quite non-chaotic, and in a sense boring and predictable, when you only run these models 100 years.
- For example: ten spaces on the vernier being made equal to nine on the scale, each vernier space is one tenth less than a scale space; and if the first line or division of the vernier agree exactly with any line of the scale, the next line of the vernier must be one tenth of a tenth (or one hundredth) of an inch from agreement with the next _scale_ division; the following vernier line must be two hundredths out, and so on: therefore, the number of such differences (from the next tenth on the scale) at which a vernier line agrees with a scale line, when set, is the number of hundredths to be added to the said tenth; (in a common barometer, reading only to hundredths of an inch).
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