AbstractAbrasive wear has long been recognised as one of the most potentially serious tribological problems facing the operators of many types of plant and machinery; several industrial surveys have indicated that wear by abrasion can be responsible for more than 50% of unscheduled machine and plant stoppages. Locating the operating point of a tribological contact in an appropriate operational ‚map’︁ can provide a useful guide to the likely nature and origins of the surface degradation experienced in use, though care must be exercised in choosing the most suitable parameters for the axes of the plot. Laboratory testing of materials and simulations of machine contacts are carried out for a number of purposes; at one level for the very practical aims of ranking candidate materials or surface hardening treatments in order of their wear resistance, or in an attempt to predict wear lives under field conditions. More fundamentally, tests may be aimed at elucidating the essential physical mechanisms of surface damage and loss, with the longer term aim of building an analytical and predictive model of the wear process itself. In many cases, component surface damage is brought about by the ingress of hard, particulate matter into machine bearing or sealing clearances. These may be running dry although, more usually, a lubricant or service fluid is present at the interface. A number of standardised wear test geometries and procedures have been established for both two‐ and three‐body wear situations, and these are briefly described. Although abrasive wear is often modelled as following an ‚Archard’︁ equation (i.e. a linear increase in material loss with both load and time, and an inverse dependence on specimen hardness) both industrial experience and laboratory tests of particularly lubricated contacts show that this is not always the case: increasing the hardness differential in an abrasively contaminated lubricated pair may not always reduce the rate of damage to the