Lode

//ləʊd// noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A way or path; a road. obsolete
  2. 2
    a deposit of valuable ore occurring within definite boundaries separating it from surrounding rocks wordnet
  3. 3
    A watercourse. dialectal
  4. 4
    A vein of metallic ore that lies within definite boundaries, or within a fissure.

    "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."

  5. 5
    A rich source of supply. broadly

    "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."

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.

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