turn the scale
verb1
Idiomatic To decide or determine a balanced situation.
- Perhaps Charles Strickland's power and originality would scarcely have sufficed to turn the scale if the remarkable mythopoeic faculty of mankind had not brushed aside with impatience a story which disappointed all its craving for the extraordinary.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, “chapter 1”, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:
- Synonyms
- tip the scales
- Derived terms
- turn the scales at