lode

Meaning

Noun

• A way or path; a road.
• A watercourse.
• A vein of metallic ore that lies within definite boundaries, or within a fissure.
• A rich source of supply.

Origin

• 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.