The AI-powered English dictionary
plural lodes
(obsolete) A way or path; a road.
(dialectal) A watercourse. examples
(mining) A vein of metallic ore that lies within definite boundaries, or within a fissure. quotations examples
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.
1967, Henry C. Berg, Edward Huntington Cobb, Metalliferous Lode Deposits of Alaska, page 14
(by extension) A rich source of supply. quotations examples
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.
2019 September 25, Gary Stix, “Two Linguists Use Their Skills to Inspect 21,739 Trump Tweets”, in Scientific American