escalate [E20th] To escalate was originally ‘to travel on an escalator’. The word came from escalator and was coined in the early 1920s, when escalators were still new and exciting. It is now so familiar that it is quite a surprise to realize that we have only been using it to mean ‘increase rapidly’ and ‘become more intense or serious’ since the 1950s. Escalator itself started life in 1900, as a trade name in America. It was derived from the early 19th-century word escalade, which meant ‘to scale a fortified wall by ladder’, and was suggested by elevator, the US word for ‘lift’, which had been around since the 1880s.