Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The metalliferous ore that fills a fissure in a rock formation.
  • noun A vein of mineral ore deposited between clearly demarcated layers of rock.
  • noun A rich source or supply.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A Middle English form of load.
  • noun A way; path.
  • noun A reach of water; an open ditch for carrying off water from a fen.
  • noun A metalliferous deposit having more or less of a vein-like character—that is, having a certain degree of regularity, and being confined within walls.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A water course or way; a reach of water.
  • noun (Mining) A metallic vein; any regular vein or course, whether metallic or not.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a deposit of valuable ore occurring within definite boundaries separating it from surrounding rocks

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, way, load, from Old English lād, way; see leit- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Etymologically identical with load, which has however become semantically restricted. The now-archaic lode continues the old sense of Old English lád "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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