lode
/loʊd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.71 in modern English
5
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A watercourse.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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."
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.
Origin
- Source language: Old English
Word Breakdown
- Root: lād
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /loʊd/
- British English: /ləʊd/