contact wire
contact wire noun: a bare wire conducting electricity, often the lower part of the catenary, which comes into contact with a raised pantograph or other form of current collector.
Noun
contact wire (plural contact wires)
- A bare wire conducting electricity, often the lower part of the catenary, which comes into contact with a raised pantograph or other form of current collector.
- Overhead electric equipment generally stood up well both to the weight of vertically falling snow and to the effects of snow on contact wires; [...].1962 March, “The New Year Freeze-up on British Railways”, in Modern Railways, page 158
Forms of contact wire
| plural | contact wires |
|---|
Questions about contact wire
- What does contact wire mean?
- Contact wire means a bare wire conducting electricity, often the lower part of the catenary, which comes into contact with a raised pantograph or other form of current collector.
- What part of speech is contact wire?
- Contact wire is a noun.
- What is the plural of contact wire?
- The plural of contact wire is contact wires.
Words near contact wire in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: contact wire (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “contact wire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contact_wire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.