lode

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.

noun

1. (obsolete) A way or path; a road.
2. (dialectal) A watercourse.
3. (mining) 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. 1967, Henry C. Berg, Edward Huntington Cobb, Metalliferous Lode Deposits of Alaska, page 14
4. (by extension) 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. 2019-09-25, Gary Stix, “Two Linguists Use Their Skills to Inspect 21,739 Trump Tweets”, in Scientific American