Ore
An ore is a mineral or rock from which a metal can be extracted at a profit, and every word of that is doing work. It is not a statement about composition: plenty of minerals contain copper and only a few are copper ores. Grade, depth, the price of the metal and the process available all enter into it.
Which means the same rock can stop being an ore and start again. Copper ore grades have fallen for a century as flotation and larger equipment made poorer rock economic, and deposits abandoned as worthless have been reopened on the same material at a higher price.
Material
Air
not mined, but exactly what the word means otherwise — nitrogen, oxygen, argon, neon, krypton and xenon are all economically extracted from it, and it is the only source of most of them
Rock
Banded iron formation
the source of the overwhelming majority of the world's iron, and so of essentially all steel
Mineral
Bastnäsite
the principal source of the light rare earths — cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium
Rock
Carbonatite
the dominant source of light rare earths and of niobium, and a significant one for phosphate
Mineral
Cobaltite
a cobalt ore, though most cobalt now arrives as a by-product of copper and nickel mining
Deposit type
Epithermal vein
the classic vein deposit: gold, silver, mercury and antimony, at grades high enough to have been worked by hand for centuries
Rock
Evaporite
the source of salt, potash and borates, all of them mined as the rock rather than extracted from it
Deposit type
Oxidised zone
historically the part of a deposit that was mined first — richer, softer and treatable without a smelter
Mineral
Pentlandite
the principal ore of nickel, and a major source of the platinum-group metals with it
Rock
Peridotite
the host of chromite, and the parent of the nickel laterites derived from weathering it
Deposit type
Porphyry copper deposit
the dominant source of copper and molybdenum, and a significant one for gold and rhenium
Material
Seawater
the same sense as air: magnesium and bromine are won from it at industrial scale and effectively all the world's salt, and for magnesium the resource has no limit worth discussing
Rock
Skarn
the principal source of tungsten, and a major host for copper, iron, zinc, lead and molybdenum
Mineral
Sperrylite
the most important platinum mineral, though most platinum is recovered from nickel-copper sulfide ores
Mineral
Sphalerite
the principal ore of zinc, and the main source of indium, gallium and germanium as by-products
Each of these uses is established and cited on its own. Whether something counts as an ore, for instance, depends on grade, price and era — and those qualifications are shown alongside it.