Scales

Interesting facts about the word ‘scales’

Scales is the plural and/or verb of the word scale. It also has different meanings.

He scales a cliff.

Mary used scales to weigh herself .

The fish had a coat of iridescent scales.

It is a polysemous word in that it is full of greed and wants more than one meaning: a word with many heads, or a fish with many scales. 

The root of the word scale comes from one singular meaning but over time it was adopted for these three different meanings because the words came together phonetically and visually.

Scale “to climb” first appeared in the 1400s and came to us from Italian, which in turn came from the Latin word, scandere “to climb”. It was then applied, later, to things that climb, or go up, like scales in music.

However, scales for measuring weight don’t follow the same ‘going up’ tack. These scales come from an Old Norse word ‘skal’ that meant “a drinking bowl.” So weighing scales came about because they are made with two pans or bowls, one hanging on each side. This first showed up in 1205.

Fish scales comes from an Indo-European root skel meaning “to cut”, which is the where the word shell comes from, most likely because shells were used as knives. A fish scale is a bit like a shell plate and a drinking bowl is a bit like a large deep shell. The word for fish scale cropped up around 1300 from French.