scale vs shell

scale

noun
  • A scale insect. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

shell

noun
  • The exoskeleton or wing covers of certain insects. 

  • The outer frame or case of a block within which the sheaves revolve. 

  • A light boat whose frame is covered with thin wood, impermeable fabric, or water-proofed paper; a racing shell or dragon boat. 

  • A gouge bit or shell bit. 

  • A pod containing the seeds of certain plants, such as the legume Phaseolus vulgaris. 

  • The onset and coda of a syllable. 

  • A string instrument, as a lyre, whose acoustical chamber is formed like a shell. 

  • A psychological barrier to social interaction. 

  • The calcareous or chitinous external covering of mollusks, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates. 

  • An engraved copper roller used in print works. 

  • The covering, or outside part, of a nut. 

  • A set of atomic orbitals that have the same principal quantum number. 

  • An emaciated person. 

  • The body of a drum; the often wooden, often cylindrical acoustic chamber, with or without rims added for tuning and for attaching the drum head. 

  • The cartridge of a breechloading firearm; a load; a bullet; a round. 

  • The accreted mineral formed around a hollow geode. 

  • The overlapping hard plates comprising the armor covering the armadillo's body. 

  • The conjoined scutes that constitute the "shell" (carapace) of a tortoise or turtle. 

  • The casing of a self-contained single-unit artillery projectile. 

  • A garment, usually worn by women, such as a shirt, blouse, or top, with short sleeves or no sleeves, that often fastens in the rear. 

  • One of the outer layers of skin of an onion. 

  • The outward form independent of what is inside. 

  • A legal entity that has no operations. 

  • The empty outward form of someone or something. 

  • An operating system software user interface, whose primary purpose is to launch other programs and control their interactions; the user's command interpreter. Shell is a way to separate the internal complexity of the implementation of the command from the user. The internals can change while the user experience/interface remains the same. 

  • A person's ear. 

  • Husks of cacao seeds, a decoction of which is sometimes used as a substitute or adulterant for cocoa and its products such as chocolate. 

  • The thin coating of copper on an electrotype. 

  • The watertight outer covering of the hull of a vessel, often made with planking or metal plating. 

  • A hollow, usually spherical or cylindrical projectile fired from a siege mortar or a smoothbore cannon. It contains an explosive substance designed to be ignited by a fuse or by percussion at the target site so that it will burst and scatter at high velocity its contents and fragments. Formerly called a bomb. 

  • A concave rough cast-iron tool in which a convex lens is ground to shape. 

  • Any slight hollow structure; a framework, or exterior structure, regarded as not complete or filled in, as the shell of a house. 

  • The hard calcareous covering of a bird egg. 

  • Any mollusk having such a covering. 

  • A coarse or flimsy coffin; a thin interior coffin enclosed within a more substantial one. 

verb
  • To form shallow, irregular cracks (in a coating). 

  • To disburse or give up money, to pay. (Often used with out). 

  • To cast the shell, or exterior covering; to fall out of the pod or husk. 

  • To bombard, to fire projectiles at, especially with artillery. 

  • To remove the outer covering or shell of something. 

  • To fall off, as a shell, crust, etc. 

  • To form a shelling. 

  • To switch to a shell or command line. 

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