say it: eh-skuh-LAY-shuhn
escalation is a noun meaning "an increase to counteract a perceived discrepancy". It carries one recorded sense.
an increase to counteract a perceived discrepancy
“higher wages caused an escalation of prices”
“there was a gradual escalation of hostilities”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for escalation come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.