Etymology

petascale

P3E1T1A1S1C3A1L1E1

Today it means: A metric for objects on the scale of quadrillions (10¹⁵ or 1,000,000,000,000,000) of elements. Most often used for computer systems; a petascale computer system operates at speeds measured in petaflops and has memory measured in petabytes. Full definition →

English scale ← Middle English scale ← Latin scāla
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The story

  1. Englishpeta-
  2. Proto-Indo-European*skend-
  3. Proto-Indo-European*(s)kn̥d-sleh₂
  4. Proto-Italic*skand-slā
  5. Latinscāla
  6. Middle Englishscale
  7. Englishscale
  8. English todaypetascale

From peta- + scale.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.