leaf vs scale

leaf

noun
  • A sheet of any substance beaten or rolled until very thin. 

  • Anything resembling the leaf of a plant. 

  • A flat section used to extend the size of a table. 

  • One of the teeth of a pinion, especially when small. 

  • The layer of fat supporting the kidneys of a pig, leaf fat. 

  • A Canadian person. 

  • The usually green and flat organ that represents the most prominent feature of most vegetative plants. 

  • A moveable panel, e.g. of a bridge or door, originally one that hinged but now also applied to other forms of movement. 

  • A foliage leaf or any of the many and often considerably different structures it can specialise into. 

  • A sheet of a book, magazine, etc (consisting of two pages, one on each face of the leaf). 

  • Tea leaves. 

  • In a tree, a node that has no descendants. 

  • Cannabis. 

verb
  • To divide (a vegetable) into separate leaves. 

  • To produce leaves; put forth foliage. 

scale

noun
  • The flaky material sloughed off heated metal. 

  • A mathematical base for a numeral system; radix. 

  • A device to measure mass or weight. 

  • 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. 

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. 

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