Glossary of Gold Mining Terms and Prospecting Terms focused on fossicking, recreational prospecting, small-scale dredging, metal detecting, and related activities (especially common in Australia, New Zealand, and similar placer-focused regions).
Core Concepts & Deposit Types
- Alluvial gold — Gold transported and deposited by water (in current or ancient river systems).
- Placer deposit / Placer gold — Accumulation of gold (or other heavy minerals) concentrated by gravity in sediments, typically in stream beds, terraces, or ancient river channels.
- Reef gold / Lode gold — Gold still in its original host rock (commonly quartz, but also ironstone, greenstone, etc.).
- Paydirt / Paystreak — Material or a concentrated zone containing enough gold to be worth processing.
- Overburden — Non-gold-bearing material overlying the productive layer; usually discarded.
- Bedrock — Solid rock underlying soil, gravel, or sediment; often the natural “floor” where gold settles into cracks and crevices.
- Mullock heap — Waste rock or spoil pile from mining (shafts or diggings); can still contain missed gold.
- Tailings — Processed waste material left after gold has been extracted.
- Honey hole — A particularly rich or productive spot.
- Flour gold — Extremely fine, flat, light gold particles (smaller than sand grains); hard to recover.
- Specie / Specimen — A piece of gold still attached to quartz or host rock (often attractive for collectors).
- Sunbaker — A nugget lying exposed on the surface (found without digging).
Gold Mining Techniques & Activities
- Fossicking — Recreational searching for gold, gemstones, or minerals, typically with hand tools (common term in Australia/New Zealand).
- Prospecting — The search for mineral deposits, involving sampling, observation of geology/topography, and testing ground.
- Panning — Separating gold from gravel/soil by swirling material in a pan with water so lighter material washes away and heavy gold stays behind.
- Classifying / Screening / Sieving — Passing material through mesh screens (classifiers) to separate it by size; makes recovery more efficient.
- Crevicing / Crevicing — Scraping or digging fine material from cracks and crevices in bedrock with hand tools, wire, or scrapers.
- Sniping — Carefully working cracks, bedrock irregularities, or small rich spots, often with minimal tools.
- Specking — Searching the surface for visible gold (especially after rain).
- Loaming — Systematic sampling of surface soil in a grid pattern to track gold back toward its source.
- Surfacing / Stripping — Removing overburden down to bedrock over an area to expose gold-bearing material.
- Raking — Clearing surface rocks, leaves, and debris so a detector coil can be run closer to the ground (improves depth and sensitivity).
- Puddling — Breaking up clay-rich material in water to free trapped gold.
- Dry blowing / Dry washing — Processing dry material using air (instead of water) to separate heavies; useful in arid areas.
Gold Mining Equipment – Recovery & Processing
- Gold pan — Shallow dish (often with riffles) used for manual separation of gold.
- Classifier / Sieve — Screen (various mesh sizes) used to size material before panning or sluicing.
- Sluice / Sluice box — Inclined trough or box with riffles, matting, or miners moss; water carries material through while gold is trapped.
- Riffles — Bars, obstacles, or raised sections in a sluice that create turbulence and low-pressure zones so gold drops out.
- Highbanker — Elevated sluice fed by a pump; allows processing away from the water source.
- Grizzly — Coarse bars or screen that pre-classifies material before it enters a highbanker or sluice.
- Trommel — Rotating drum that tumbles material with water, breaking up clay and classifying it.
- Dredge (suction dredge) — Small-scale machine with a suction hose/nozzle that vacuums material from a stream bed into a sluice. (Larger historical dredges were massive floating plants.)
- Dry blower / Dry washer — Device that uses pulsed air through a screen to stratify and concentrate heavies without water.
- Snuffer / Snifter bottle — Squeeze bottle with a tube used to suck up fine gold from a pan or concentrates.
- Concentrates (“cons”) — Heavy material left after initial processing (black sands, gold, dense minerals); further cleaned to recover gold.
- Black sand — Heavy iron-rich minerals (often magnetite) that concentrate with gold; commonly removed with magnets in the final cleanup.
- Spray bars — Perforated pipes that deliver water over material entering a highbanker hopper.
Metal Detecting Terms (especially gold detecting)
- Hot rock — Rock with high iron content that produces a strong signal on a detector (often dark red/brown inside).
- Mineralised ground / Hot ground — Soil with high iron-oxide or mineral content that interferes with detector performance.
- Ground balance — Detector setting that cancels or compensates for mineralisation in the ground.
- Discrimination — Detector ability/setting to ignore certain types of targets (e.g., iron trash) based on conductivity/signal characteristics.
- VLF (Very Low Frequency) — Common detector technology; good discrimination but more affected by mineralisation.
- PI (Pulse Induction) — Detector technology better suited to highly mineralised ground and often preferred for gold nugget hunting; generally poorer discrimination.
- Coil — The search head of the detector; different sizes and shapes affect depth, coverage, and sensitivity to small targets.
Other Useful Terms
- Rock bar — Natural bedrock ridge or bar across a stream that acts like a natural riffle, trapping gold.
- Riparian zone — Vegetated area along a stream or river.
- Pipe clay — Whitish clay often associated with old river channels.
- Matrix — The surrounding material in which gold or minerals are embedded.
This covers the main vocabulary used by recreational fossickers, prospectors, small-scale dredgers, and gold detectorists. Terminology can vary slightly by region (e.g., “fossicking” is strongly Australian/NZ, while “placer” is more universal). Laws and access rules also differ greatly by location—always check local regulations before digging or dredging.