How to Use mother lode in a Sentence

mother lode

noun
  • But back onboard The Dare, there’s no sign its crew will be stopping the search for the mother lode anytime soon.
    Jay O'Brien, ABC News, 11 Nov. 2023
  • In the storm’s wake, the mother lode of numbing cold will crash south — likely to be the last but most bitter in brutal blasts since Christmas Eve in the Northeast.
    Jason Samenow, Washington Post, 3 Jan. 2018
  • The Austrian capital was (apart from the Churchill) the mother lode of our collection.
    Zofia Smardz, Washington Post, 26 July 2019
  • Foster got a rusty relic found in the crud from the pumpkin factory, and my father got a similar knife found by Foster in some other mother lode.
    John Gould, The Christian Science Monitor, 21 Oct. 2022
  • If conversions are the mother lode of profitable marketing, what’s the best strategic approach to improving them?
    Paul Talbot, Forbes, 7 Dec. 2021
  • And the only other cities in 2017 to remotely rival Houston’s mother lode of super-high-end athletic prowess would be those who also have NHL teams in the mix.
    Dale Robertson, San Antonio Express-News, 5 Jan. 2018
  • Two-thousand-five-hundred miles west of Dodger Stadium was a mother lode of Dodgers memorabilia.
    Lewis Abraham Leader, Los Angeles Times, 30 Aug. 2023
  • The mother lode of winter storms has sent water blasting through rock crevices and rivers in the Sierra Nevada, leading to more glittering discoveries by prospectors.
    Thomas Fuller Jim Wilson, New York Times, 22 Apr. 2023
  • This, along with a careful job of valve-train and ignition tuning, uncovered a mother lode of horsepower in the single-overhead-cam, four-cylinder engine.
    Patrick Bedard, Car and Driver, 23 Jan. 2023
  • Cattle that once sold for $4 a head in Southern California was worth 25 times more in Northern California’s mother lode country.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 June 2022
  • And the collection is still a meiofauna mother lode for contemporary researchers.
    Adrienne Mason, Smithsonian, 2 Mar. 2018
  • Demolition squads of scholars have stencil-brushed the casing and every wire of the corpus; warning tape encircles the mother lode of fifty books, which are still capable of sending readers sky-high.
    Thomas Meaney, Harper’s Magazine , 16 Feb. 2023
  • Another natural focus of the NASA study is thawing permafrost, which, when melted, would release a mother lode of stored carbon and methane into the atmosphere.
    National Geographic, 23 June 2016
  • But there may be other spots on the moon that could yield a mother lode of scientific data—as well as the resources needed to sustain human occupation of Earth’s celestial next door neighbor.
    Leonard David, Scientific American, 31 July 2019
  • Many a stalwart Texan backed away after one look at the Tuscan red woodwork, lumbering swaths of green granite countertops, and mother lode of gaudy golds that once defined the interiors of this Dallas home.
    Sally Finder Weepie, Better Homes & Gardens, 5 May 2022
  • The biennial’s emphasis on Chicago is all to the good, reversing the tendency of the first two exhibitions to treat the city as a backdrop rather than a mother lode that could be mined for comparisons, contrasts and connections with other cities.
    Blair Kamin, chicagotribune.com, 19 Sep. 2019
  • This mother lode of findings comes after a six-year delving into genomes representing more than a million people, a quest for unusual genetic signals that track with one or more of 42 disorders and traits.
    Emily Willingham, Scientific American, 22 June 2018
  • Brazilian paleontologists rediscovered a mother lode of fossils that had been lost for decades.
    Erika Page, The Christian Science Monitor, 15 Aug. 2022
  • Soviet geologists discovered a diamond mother lode deep in the Siberian wilderness, and the company was founded soon after, in 1957.
    Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, 11 July 2018
  • Truly, America’s protean black musical mother lode has found expression in popular genres of its own invention—not string quartets, symphonies and operas.
    Joseph Horowitz, WSJ, 7 Feb. 2020
  • California, because of its enormous population and mother lode of wealthy donors, is traditionally a top source of donations for presidential hopefuls as well as House and Senate candidates of both parties in races across the country.
    Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times, 29 July 2022
  • This is the mother lode of Egyptian antiquities, the country’s ceremonial capital for millennia.
    Klara Glowczewska, Town & Country, 18 June 2023
  • Pebble Partnership’s corporate parent, Northern Dynasty Minerals, originally envisioned 78 years of mining, which would recover a little more than half of the mother lode.
    Los Angeles Times, 23 Oct. 2019
  • Regardless, with California’s sports-enthusiastic population of 39 million trouncing that of the over 19 million in New York, legalizing online sports betting is expected to generate a taxable mother lode of riches.
    Lance Pugmire, USA TODAY, 4 May 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'mother lode.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: