The phrase "a terrible scale" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a scale that is significantly negative or unfavorable in some context, such as measuring severity or impact.
Example: "The environmental damage caused by the oil spill was on a terrible scale, affecting wildlife and local communities."
Alternatives: "a disastrous magnitude" or "an awful extent".
We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale.
But in war, the environment suffers from neglect, exploitation, human desperation and deliberate abuse on a terrible scale.
Never mind that stars are a fine way to rate ergonomic keyboards but a terrible scale for novels, does that not feel rotten?
"We can not accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale," he said.
The deliberate destruction of Britain's coalmining industry following the miners' strike against pit closures of 1984-85 created suffering on a terrible scale.
"Bombing was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First," Mr. Swift writes, "a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss".
Growing up in South Africa it was right there around you: I mean human suffering and injustice on a terrible, terrible scale, and also human nobility".
The outcome of the second world war was decided by many millions of people first making and then handling industrial equipment to kill one another on an inconceivably terrible scale.
1424 Suddenly, the terrible scale of today's attack becomes clear.
Ultimately, the point of the riots panel is to understand and make clear recommendations on how this country might avoid disturbances on the terrible scale seen in August happening again.
"Oh I say," he said, reunited for the first time since 1915, "Oh I say …" For some time I had had the impression that the terrible scale of the Great War was something that had not been properly understood by people of my generation.
