The emergence of semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) atomic layers has opened up unprecedented opportunities in atomically thin electronics. Yet the scalable growth of TMD layers with large grain sizes and uniformity has remained very challenging. Here is reported a simple, scalable chemical vapor deposition approach for the growth of MoSe2 layers is reported, in which the nucleation density can be reduced from 10(5) to 25 nuclei cm(-2), leading to millimeter-scale MoSe2 single crystals as well as continuous macrocrystalline films with millimeter size grains. The selective growth of monolayers and multilayered MoSe2 films with well-defined stacking orientation can also be controlled via tuning the growth temperature. In addition, periodic defects, such as nanoscale triangular holes, can be engineered into these layers by controlling the growth conditions. The low density of grain boundaries in the films results in high average mobilities, around approximate to 42 cm(2) V-1 s(-1), for back-gated MoSe2 transistors. This generic synthesis approach is also demonstrated for other TMD layers such as millimeter-scale WSe2 single crystals.