Word.ws English Dictionary

mother-lode

mother-lode is the alternative form of mother lode.

Meaning of mother lode

Noun

mother lode (plural mother lodes)

  1. A large or rich vein of gold or of another precious mineral from which other branches extend.
    • Undeterred, reasoning from the coarseness of the gold that it had not traveled far, they had set out in search of the mother lode.1912, Jack London, “The Little Man”, in Smoke Bellew
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) Any source of valuable or useful material.
    • It is also letting them probe the genomes of other organisms for DNA that could turn out to be a mother lode for medicine.2000 April 10, Dick Thompson, “The Feds Step Up the Pace”, in Time

Forms of mother-lode

pluralmother-lodes

Questions about mother-lode

What is mother-lode the alternative form of?
Mother-lode is the alternative form of mother lode.

Words near mother-lode in the dictionary

  1. mother-in-law style
  2. mother-in-law's cushion
  3. mother-in-law's tongue
  4. mother-in-law's tongues
  5. mother-in-laws
  6. mother-lode
  7. mother-lodes
  8. mother-naked
  9. mother-of-pearl
  10. mother-of-pearl cloud
  11. mother-of-pearl clouds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mother-lode (page history and authors); mother lode (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “mother-lode.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mother-lode. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.