The Etymology of Echelon
Echelon entered English in 1796, a French military loan from the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars when so many French tactical terms — bivouac, rendezvous, brigade, terrain, reconnaissance — were absorbed into English. French échelon is built on échelle (ladder), itself from Latin scala (ladder, stairs), the same root that gives English scale (the verb meaning to climb), escalate, and escalator. An échelon is literally a rung of a ladder. In 18th-century French military parlance, an échelon formation was an arrangement of units in parallel lines, each one stepped sideways and slightly behind the one before it — when seen from above, it looked like the rungs of a leaned ladder, hence the name. The figurative use was easy and fast: by the early 19th century, echelon meant any tier or rank in a hierarchical structure — the upper echelons of government, the lower echelons of management. The Latin scala goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root *skand- meaning to climb or leap — the same root behind ascend, descend, and scandere (Italian for verse-scansion).