climb vs scale

climb

verb
  • To scale; to get to the top of something. 

  • To mount; to move upwards on. 

  • To move to a higher position on the social ladder. 

  • to jump high 

  • Of plants, to grow upwards by clinging to something. 

  • To move (especially up and down something) by gripping with the hands and using the feet. 

  • to practise the sport of climbing 

  • To ascend; rise; to go up. 

noun
  • The act of getting to somewhere more elevated. 

  • An upwards struggle 

  • An act of climbing. 

scale

verb
  • To climb to the top of. 

  • 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. 

  • To weigh, measure or grade according to a scale or system. 

  • To separate and come off in thin layers or laminae. 

  • To scatter; to spread. 

  • To strip or clear of scale; to descale. 

  • To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors. 

  • To become scaly; to produce or develop scales. 

  • To take off in thin layers or scales, as tartar from the teeth; to pare off, as a surface. 

  • To clean, as the inside of a cannon, by the explosion of a small quantity of powder. 

  • To remove the scales of. 

noun
  • A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix. 

  • A device to measure mass or weight. 

  • The flaky material sloughed off heated metal. 

  • Part of an overlapping arrangement of many small, flat and hard protective layers forming a pinecone that flare when mature to release pine nut seeds. 

  • Limescale. 

  • Size; scope. 

  • Gradation; succession of ascending and descending steps and degrees; progressive series; scheme of comparative rank or order. 

  • Scale mail (as opposed to chain mail). 

  • A small piece of pigmented chitin, many of which coat the wings of a butterfly or moth to give them their color. 

  • A line or bar associated with a drawing, used to indicate measurement when the image has been magnified or reduced. 

  • A standard amount of money to be received by a performer or writer, negotiated by a union. 

  • A series of notes spanning an octave, tritave, or pseudo-octave, used to make melodies. 

  • A scale insect. 

  • An ordered, usually numerical sequence used for measurement, means of assigning a magnitude. 

  • The ratio of depicted distance to actual distance. 

  • 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 flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis. 

  • The thin metallic side plate of the handle of a pocketknife. 

  • Either of the pans, trays, or dishes of a balance or scales. 

How often have the words climb and scale occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )