A series of experiments describing the wear of steel rollers during lubricated pure rolling contact are presented. A four-roller machine is used for the experiment; the velocity difference between the mating rollers is maintained equal to zero, while the surface roughness and oil film thickness are varied. Even under the lubricated pure rolling condition, a finite amount of wear is observed when the oil film thickness is comparable to or less than the resultant surface roughness. A common, feature is found in the wear characteristics when either the surface roughness or oil film thickness is varied: the effective surface roughness, defined as the difference between the resultant roughness and the oil film thickness, is found to correlate with both the amount of wear and strain hardening. Results are discussed from a mechanical point of view that wear is a phenomenon of fracture in surface layer resulting from repetition of stresses around contact points.Presented as an American Society of Lubrication Engineers paper at the ASLE/ASME Lubrication Conference in Dayton, Ohio, October 16–18, 1979