SCALES

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."

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."

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.