Word.ws English Dictionary

contact wires

contact wires is the plural of contact wire.

Meaning of contact wire

Noun

contact wire (plural contact wires)

  1. 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

Questions about contact wires

What is contact wires the plural of?
Contact wires is the plural of contact wire.

Words near contact wires in the dictionary

  1. contact tracers
  2. contact traces
  3. contact tracing
  4. contact tracings
  5. contact wire
  6. contact wires
  7. contact wound
  8. contact wounds
  9. contact-free
  10. contact-trace
  11. contact-traced

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contact wires (page history and authors); 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.

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Cite this entry: “contact wires.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contact_wires. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.