load

Meanings

A burden; a weight to be carried.
A worry or concern to be endured, especially in the phrase a load off one's mind.
A certain number of articles or quantity of material that can be transported or processed at one time.
A quantity of washing put into a washing machine for a wash cycle.
A large number or amount.
The volume of work required to be performed.
The force exerted on a structural component such as a beam, girder, cable etc.
The electrical current or power delivered by a device.
A resistive force encountered by a prime mover when performing work.
Any component that draws current or power from an electrical circuit.
A unit of measure for various quantities.
The viral load
A very small explosive inserted as a gag into a cigarette or cigar.
The charge of powder for a firearm.
Weight or violence of blows.
The contents (e.g. semen) of an ejaculation.
Nonsense; rubbish.
The process of loading something, i.e. transferring it into memory or over a network, etc.
(cyberterm/slang) An acronym that later became a noun describing a person that spent all day online "Living Online All Day." The term was originally used in the late 1980s to describe users on free Q-Link (later America Online) accounts who never signed off the system at great expense to the company.

To put a load on or in (a means of conveyance or a place of storage).
To place in or on a conveyance or a place of storage.
To put a load on something.
To receive a load.
To be placed into storage or conveyance.
To fill (a firearm or artillery) with munition.
To insert (an item or items) into an apparatus so as to ready it for operation, such as a reel of film into a camera, sheets of paper into a printer etc.
To fill (an apparatus) with raw material.
To read (data or a program) from a storage medium into computer memory.
To transfer from a storage medium into computer memory.
To put runners on first, second and third bases
To tamper with so as to produce a biased outcome.
To ask or adapt a question so that it will be more likely to be answered in a certain way.
To encumber with something negative, to place as an encumbrance.
To provide in abundance.
To weight (a cane, whip, etc.) with lead or similar.
To adulterate or drug.
To magnetize.

The sense of “burden” first arose in the 13th century as a secondary meaning of Middle English lode, loade, which had the main significance of “way, course, journey”, from Old English lād ("course, journey; way, street, waterway; leading, carrying; maintenance, support") (ultimately from Proto-Germanic *laidō ("leading, way"), Proto-Indo-European *leyt- ("to go, go forth, die"), cognate with Middle Low German leide ("entourage, escort"), German Leite ("line, course, load"), Swedish led ("way, trail, line"), Icelandic leið ("way, course, route")).
As such, load is a lode, which has preserved the older meaning.
Most likely, the semantic extension of the Middle English substantive arose by conflation with the (etymologically unrelated) verb lade; however, Middle English lode occurs only as a substantive; the transitive verb load is recorded only in the 16th century (frequently in Shakespeare),
Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (2013), .
and (except for the participle laden) has largely supplanted lade in modern English."but lade is now usually replaced in the present and the past tense by load, a derivative from the noun load". Hans Kurath, George Oliver Curme, A grammar of the English language vol. 2 (1935), p. 262.

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