This paper concerns the physical process of heat transfer from hot wires located in the proximity of walls consisting of different thermal conductivities. It points out that it is common practice to calibrate hot wires in a free stream of constant and known velocity, but when utilized for near-wall measurements additional heat losses occur owing to the presence of the wall, resulting in erroneous velocity readings. Therefore, a combined experimental and numerical methodology for heat transfer from a heated wire in a flow field is proposed, taking the effects of wire diameter, overheat ratio, wall thermal conductivity, wall distance, wall thickness and shear rate on the measured velocity into account. The present investigations indicated that the flow under the plate, i.e., the corresponding shear rate at the wall opposite the location of the wire where velocity measurements were taken, changes the thermal boundary conditions around the hot wire. It was also observed that heat diffusivity is dominant in the wall region and plays the major role in heat transfer from the wire rather than convection, especially for highly heat-conducting materials. For highly heat-conducting walls, a universal correction law for the wall influence was given by Durst et al. [F. Durst, E.-S. Zanoun, M. Pashtrapanska, In situ calibration of hot wires close to highly heat-conducting walls, Exp. Fluids 31 (2001) 103-110]. However, for poorly heat-conducting walls, the correction law depends on the wall thickness and the heat transfer from the surface opposite the wall where the hot-wire measurements were performed. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.