Wyre

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An old spelling of wire, meaning a thin strand of metal drawn out for use ; the name of a river flowing through Lancashire into the Irish Sea
2. A thin metal thread, an archaic variant of wire ; a river in northwest England that empties into Morecambe Bay in Lancashire
3. An obsolete spelling for a drawn metal filament ; the title of a northwestern English river that runs across Lancashire to the coast

Etymology: "Wyre" is simply an obsolete spelling of "wire," so its story is the story of the modern word. Old English "wīr" meant a metal thread or a wire-ornament, the sort of fine metal drawn out into a length and worked into jewellery or decoration, before it came to mean the everyday cable or strand we know now. That Old English word traces back to a Proto-Germanic form, "*wīraz," which denoted the same thing, and before that to a reconstructed Indo-European root meaning "a twist, thread, cord," tied to a verb for turning, twisting or weaving. The shape of the original idea is still visible in the word. A wire is, at heart, something twisted or plaited into a thin, flexible line, and the early sense of a thread or cord carries that notion of twisting forward. The spelling "wyre," with its y, was a Middle English and early modern variant, and it survives only in older texts and in a few deliberate archaic usages.