load [OE] In Old English load meant ‘way, journey, course, conveyance’ and could also mean the act of loading. In Middle English it developed the modern sense of ‘that which is carried’. The ancient root of load is related to that of the metal *lead. The word lode meaning ‘a vein of ore’ and found also in lodestone [E16th] for a magnetic rock was originally just a different spelling of load. In earlier use load and lode were used interchangeably for both sets of meanings. The expression loads of ‘lots, heaps’ goes back as far as Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where the original spelling was ‘loades a’. In the 20th century loadsa started appearing in print as one word, and in the late 1980s the comedian Harry Enfield created the character Loadsamoney, a flash Tory who boasted about the money he had made and threw wads of cash around. Loadsamoney was seen as epitomizing the ‘get-rich-quick’ ethos of the Thatcher years.