level

level

1. The phrase at — level is well established and has a useful role to play:

• No work is at present supported at international level on oil seeds such as sunflower, safflower and rapeseed —Nature, 1974

• The Treasury took the lead in setting up official inter-departmental committees, some at permanent-secretary level —Harold Wilson, 1976

• If you are looking for a vice-chancellor, ideally you want to appoint a candidate who knows how the system works at national level —Times Higher Educational Supplement, 2006

2. Level playing field is a vogue use that arose in the 1980s and 1990s referring to a sphere of activity in which no particular side has the advantage. It has rapidly achieved the status of cliché, and the verbal plays are already proliferating among journalists with column-inches to fill:

• That is not a level playing field. It is not even just a home-field advantage. It is like asking their competitors to play ball in a swamp —Washington Journalism Review, 1990

• One of several suggestions was that BSkyB might be broken up to level the playing field —Business & Money, 2007

3. For the verb, the inflected forms are levelled, levelling in BrE and leveled, leveling in AmE.