These words are historically related, but their meanings are different. And while load is a common word with many different uses, lode is a very specific word, not used every day.
Lode is a noun meaning “a deposit of metal ore”—a natural collection of metal, such as gold or iron, underground, inside the rock:
The company bought the mountain in order to mine its lode of silver ore.
To mine means to dig up and remove metal from the Earth. Metal inside rock in the ground is called ore.
Load, in contrast, is a very general word, for anything carried, or a large amount of anything:
Load as a verb:
We loaded our bags into the car. / We loaded the car with our bags.
Mike felt over-loaded with work / Work was over-loading him.
(The second sentence examples means “He was carrying too much work.”)
Load as a noun:
The boat was carrying a load of wood from the jungle to market.
My friend has such a big load of DVDs at his house!
The sentences above show the main ideas of load, but there are also many special uses, as shown by the following examples:
load a gun (put bullets in a gun)
load a camera (put film in a camera)
load a program (run a program on a computer)
That’s a loaded question; it assumes a lot.
The game was unfair because he used loaded dice (dice unfairly weighted).
There are also many other words in English containing the word load; we’ll end with examples of just a few:
a workload (amount of work)
to upload (transfer a file from your computer to the internet)
to download (transfer a file from the internet to your own computer)