noun

• (obsolete) A ladder; a series of steps; a means of ascending.
• (music) A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies.

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.
  "We should scale that up by a factor of 10."
• (transitive) To climb to the top of.
  "Hilary and Norgay were the first known to have scaled Everest."
• (intransitive, computing) To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
  "That architecture won't scale to real-world environments."
• (transitive) To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system.
  "Scaling his present bearing with his past."

noun

• (uncountable) The flaky material sloughed off heated metal.
• (uncountable) Limescale.
• (uncountable, US) An infestation of scale insects on a plant; commonly thought of as, or mistaken for, a disease.

verb

• (transitive) To remove the scales of.
  "Please scale that fish for dinner."
• (intransitive) To become scaly; to produce or develop scales.
  "The dry weather is making my skin scale."
• (transitive) To strip or clear of scale; to descale.
  "to scale the inside of a boiler"
• (transitive) To take off in thin layers or scales, as tartar from the teeth; to pare off, as a surface.
  "1684-1690, Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth if all the mountains and hills were scaled, and the earth made even"