mines

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of mine.

   The region's copper mines employed thousands of laborers.

   Abandoned mines pose serious safety risks to anyone who wanders inside.

   Note

   One plural covers every kind of mine: copper workings, a figurative source of wealth, tunnels dug under enemy lines, explosive devices laid in a field, ground-bursting fireworks, even the cavities a caterpillar eats inside a leaf. Context does the sorting, since miners work in mines and soldiers clear them. The same spelling also serves the present-tense verb and a nonstandard pronoun, so the sentence's grammar shows which word you have.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of mine.

   The firm mines lithium from the dried salt flats.

   A modern algorithm mines patterns from enormous datasets.

   Note

   Behind this ordinary present-tense ending sit two very different jobs. A company mines ore from the ground, while a navy mines a harbor by sowing it with explosives. The verb works with or without an object: a firm mines copper, and a burrowing animal simply mines beneath the soil. In the older sense of undermining, what gets mined is a foundation, dug away from below.

3. 3
   pronounnonstandard

   Alternative form of mine, meaning "belonging to me." Nonstandard and widely considered incorrect.

   She kept saying the last slice was mines.

   Those boots are mines, not his.

   Note

   A possessive built by analogy: it borrows the final -s of ours, yours and theirs, so that mine matches its neighbors. That logic makes it feel natural in casual speech, but it is marked nonstandard and proscribed. In writing, and anywhere correctness is judged, use mine. It fills the same slots as the standard form, as in the slice is mines or those boots are mines.

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