levelage

English

Etymology

level +‎ -age

Noun

levelage (countable and uncountable, plural levelages)

1. The act or process of leveling.
   • 1881, The Mining Record - Volume 16, page 280:

     Since connection was made by levelage with German main shaft, a large body of ore has been opened which is being backstoped.^[sic]

   • 1884, United States. Bureau of the Mint, Report of the Director of the Mint Upon the Production of the Precious Metals in the United States during the Calendar Year 1883, page 306:

     The entire group can be worked by a system of levelage and cross-cuts from the workings of the main shaft on the Columbia Avenue.

   • 1897, Julien Gordon, Eat Not Thy Heart, page 16:

     The most advanced socialist could not have desired a more perfect system of levelage.

2. The measured level of something.
   • 1852, Charles Whittlesey, Fugitive essays, upon interesting and useful subjects, page 91:

     The surface of Lake Erie has generally been considered as five hundred and sixty-four feet above tide-water at Albany; see the Report of Michigan, 1839-40. The topographer of that State, S.W. Higgins, Esq., puts it at 565, 333 feet. If this last number represents the levelage of the Erie Canal, it is probably good for the surface of the Lake, as it was when the surveys were made for that work, twenty-five years since.

   • 1917, Preston Manasseh Hickey, James Thomas Case, Harry Miles Imboden, The American Journal of Roentgenology, Radium Therapy and Nuclear Medicine, Volume 4:

     The little instrument and methods which I shall describe can be applied in any of our American laboratories, either in the recumbent posture, which I believe is the most popular, or it can be used in the vertical position, because the instrument will give an accurate levelage of the skull in any position.

   • 1980, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Agriculture, Hearings Before the Committee on Agriculture:

     We are really not very comfortable with the levelage on the system this bill will imply, but we think that will be helpful and would like to give it some more thought.

   • 1981, Information Bulletin of the Union of National Economic Associations in Japan:

     Then, he reviewed various conflicts of interests among social classes and regions, such as monopoly banking business in the east, monopoly heavy industries in the mid-west, monopoly cotton plantation in the south, farmers in the west, as well as urban middle classes, in an attempt to identify their positions and levelages on the tariff issue, gold standard dispute and the U.S.-Spanish War controversy.