scale
/skeɪl/
Dictionary
noun
- 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."
- Size; scope.
"The Holocaust was insanity on an enormous scale."
- 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.
- A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies.
- A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix.
"the decimal scale; the binary scale"
- Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order.
- A standard amount of money to be received by a performer or writer, negotiated by a union.
"Sally wasn't the star of the show, so she was glad to be paid scale."
verb
- 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."
- 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.
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