Old English lād 'way, course', variant of load. The term denoted a watercourse in late Middle English and a lodestone in the early 16th century The current sense dates from the early 17th century.

• load from Old English:

  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 (early 16th century) 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.