scale

A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending.

An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement; means of assigning a magnitude.

Please rate your experience on a scale from 1 to 10.

The magnitude of an earthquake is measured on the open-ended Richter scale.

Size; scope.

There are some who question the scale of our ambitions.

We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance.

This map uses a scale of 1:10.

A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced.

Even though precision can be carried to an extreme, the scales which now are drawn in (and usually connected to an appropriate figure by an arrow) will allow derivation of meaningful measurements.

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.

We should scale that up by a factor of 10.

To climb to the top of.

Hilary and Norgay were the first known to have scaled Everest.

At last I came to the great barrier-cliffs; and after three days of mad effort—of maniacal effort—I scaled them. I built crude ladders; I wedged sticks in narrow fissures; I chopped toe-holds and finger-holds with my long knife; but at last I scaled them. Near the summit I came upon a huge cavern.

To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.

That architecture won't scale to real-world environments.

To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.

Scaling his present bearing with his past.

The kitchen-dining-buffet car scales 49.2 tons.

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.

Every single print that goes out our door has a warning in its title block telling the world, "Do not scale this drawing."

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.

Fish that, with their fins and shining scales, / Glide under the green wave.

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.

The flaky material sloughed off heated metal.