lode

Meanings

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

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.