How to Use mother lode in a Sentence

mother lode

noun
  • While all of Arizona attracts bats for at least part of the year, this is the mother lode.
    — Brandon Loomis, The Arizona Republic, 20 May 2024
  • While their pro shop didn’t have much on sale, REI’s website is the mother lode of markdowns.
    — Katie Jackson, Travel + Leisure, 16 Mar. 2024
  • 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
  • The Austrian capital was (apart from the Churchill) the mother lode of our collection.
    — Zofia Smardz, Washington Post, 26 July 2019
  • If conversions are the mother lode of profitable marketing, what’s the best strategic approach to improving them?
    — Paul Talbot, Forbes, 7 Dec. 2021
  • Related article Parents are up against the ‘mother lode’ of holiday stress.
    — Katia Hetter, CNN, 12 Dec. 2024
  • Related article Parents are up against the ‘mother lode’ of holiday stress.
    — Andrea Kane, CNN, 16 Dec. 2024
  • And the collection is still a meiofauna mother lode for contemporary researchers.
    — Adrienne Mason, Smithsonian, 2 Mar. 2018
  • 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
  • Brazilian paleontologists rediscovered a mother lode of fossils that had been lost for decades.
    — Erika Page, The Christian Science Monitor, 15 Aug. 2022
  • Beyond mother lodes of oil or natural gas, ready cash can also be generated with diamond or gold mines, precious metals, and rare minerals.
    — Stephen Kotkin, Foreign Affairs, 16 Dec. 2025
  • 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
  • The hustling spirit of the gold rush lives on today in the prospecting influencers who toil in the content mines of the Internet, hoping to hit the viral mother lode.
    — Jennifer Wilson, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • 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
  • From their inception, the Rockies have continually sought better pitching and seldom struck the mother lode.
    — Chuck Murr, Forbes, 16 Sep. 2024
  • Being kind and realistic with themselves, finding time to connect with friends and nature, and asking for help are all ways to help manage the mother lode of stresses parents are under.
    — Kara Alaimo, CNN, 1 Sep. 2024
  • 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 vanity in the dressing room of the pop-up is the Easter egg mother lode, according to the Spotify reps, who encouraged us to look closely on it for clues.
    — Stephanie McNeal, Glamour, 30 Sep. 2025
  • And in another kind of desert, the Tatacoa in Colombia, two bare-bones museums hold a mother lode of 10 million-year-old fossils for study.
    — Troy Aidan Sambajon, Christian Science Monitor, 2 Mar. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • But recently, the Leawood resident (a scientific illustrator by trade) struck the mother lode.
    — Randy Mason, Kansas City Star, 2 Jan. 2025
  • 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
  • Brands briefly digs below the surface to question whether Lindbergh and Roosevelt were sincere, but further digging would have unearthed a mother lode of insincerities.
    — Bruce Fein, Baltimore Sun, 29 Nov. 2024
  • But for a noir of isolation and concealment, about how the past can often feel inescapable, these shadowy dugouts — Travis’ motel, a church and one character’s lonely lair — are an atmospheric mother lode.
    — Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 21 Mar. 2024
  • 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
  • So in our current environment, where mortgage rates skyrocketed from historic lows throughout the pandemic to a more than two-decade high in October last year, being mortgage-free is like hitting the mother lode.
    — Rachel Ventresca, Fortune, 6 June 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

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.

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