the.com/mother lode
The vein so rich it makes every other discovery look like a rounding error.
means The primary, richest source of whatever you're after — a term now used for any jackpot of money, information, or resources, not just gold.
from Straight out of 19th-century mining talk in the American West: a 'lode' is a vein of ore running through rock, and the 'mother lode' was the main, principal vein feeding all the smaller, branching ones — the source from which lesser veins split off. Prospectors chasing scraps of ore dreamed of tracing them back to this mother vein. The term widened over time into a general phrase for any big, central source of riches, long after most people stopped thinking about actual rock.
- origin
- mother meaning main or source, lode meaning ore vein
- misspelling
- often wrongly written as motherload
- usage shift
- now means any jackpot, not just gold