Meaning

• 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."

Meaning

• 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.