A traditional unit measuring the diameter (or the cross-sectional area) of a wire. Various wire gauge scales have been used in the U.S. and Britain. In traditional scales, larger gauge numbers represent thinner wires. (For very thick wires, repeated zeros are used instead of negative numbers, so gauges 00, 000, and 0000 represent -1, -2, and -3, respectively.) In the American Wire Gauge (AWG) scale, 0000 gauge represents a wire having a diameter of 0.46 inch and 36 gauge represents a diameter of 0.005 inch (5 mils). Diameters for the other gauges are obtained by geometric interpolation, meaning that the ratio between successive diameters is a constant, except for necessary roundoff. Thus n gauge wire has a diameter of .005·92^((36-n)/39) inch. The metric wire gauge number is equal to 10 times the diameter of the wire, in millimeters; thus a metric 8 gauge wire has diameter 0.8 millimeters. A table of wire gauge equivalents is provided