a piece of metal drawn through the hole of an iron into a thread of a fineness answering to the hole it passed through. Wires are frequently drawn so fine as to be wrought along with other threads of silk, wool, flax, &c. The metals most commonly drawn into wire are gold, silver, copper, and iron. Gold wire is made of cylindrical ingots of silver, covered over with a skin of gold, and thus drawn successively through a vast number of holes, each smaller and smaller, till at last it is brought to a fineness exceeding that of a hair. That admirable ductility which makes one of the distinguishing characters of gold, is nowhere more conspicuous than in this gilt wire. A cylinder of forty-eight ounces of silver, covered with a coat of gold only weighing one ounce, as Dr Halley informs us, is usually drawn into a wire, two yards of which weigh no more than one grain; whence ninety-eight yards of the wire weigh no more than forty-nine grains, and one single grain of gold covers the ninety-eight yards; so that the ten thousandth part of a grain is above one eighth of an inch long.