lode
nounUK /ləʊd/ · US /loʊd/
Etymology Doublet of load, which has however become semantically restricted. The now-archaic lode continues the old sense of Old English lād (“way, course, journey”) but by the 19th century survived only dialectally in the sense of “watercourse”, as a technical term in mining, and in the compounds lodestone, lodestar.
1
Obsolete A way or path; a road.
2
Dialectal A watercourse.
- The metals traditionally sought in the Bristol Bay region have been gold and copper, mostly in deposits near Lake Iliamna. An exception is a gold lode discovered about 1930 near Sleitat Mountain (4), where about $200 in gold was recovered from small quartz veins near the periphery of a small granitic intrusive body.1967, Henry C. Berg, Edward Huntington Cobb, Metalliferous Lode Deposits of Alaska, page 14:
4
Broadly A rich source of supply.
- In recent years, Jack Grieve of the department of English and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England has embraced Twitter as a bountiful lode for looking at language-use patterns.2019 September 25, Gary Stix, “Two Linguists Use Their Skills to Inspect 21,739 Trump Tweets”, in Scientific American:
- Derived terms
- lodeship, lodesman, lodestar, mother lode
- Related terms
- loadstone