From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishscale something ↔ down/back phrasal verbREDUCEto reduce the amount or size of something → decrease The emergency aid programme has now been scaled down. → scale→ See Verb table
Examples from the Corpus
scale down/back• There were iguanas, large lizards with a crest of scales along their backs.• Luther and others scaled Mary back down to a merely human, but eminently worthy, model of faith.• Some banks try to scale their prices down for small - business customers to entice them to use electronic services.• When the needle indicates 1 to 2 dots on the scale Turn back on to the inbound heading.• These equations can be scaled up or down, rotated, or anything else, without having to redefine them.• At the cliff Mitchell hung a towel on a sea-grape branch and scaled barefoot down the rocks to the colorless water.• Recipes can be automatically scaled up or down to feed any number of people.• Does it allow graphics to be scaled up or down to fit? 