pellicle vs scale

pellicle

noun
  • The skin of a mushroom cap. 

  • A skin or coating of proteins on the surface of meat to be smoked, improving the surface adhesion. 

  • The growth on the surface of a liquid culture. 

  • A thin plastic membrane used as a beam splitter or protective cover. 

  • A thin skin or film. 

  • The outermost layer of a mushroom, often used only for a surface that is viscid and easily peels off. 

  • Cuticle, the hard protective outer layer of certain life forms. 

  • The photosensitive emulsion of photographic film. 

scale

noun
  • A flake of skin of an animal afflicted with dermatitis. 

  • 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. 

  • 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 pellicle and scale occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )