Wolf-Rayet stars as seen through IUE (low resolution)

Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are very hot and massive objects, which spectra are dominated by strong and wide emission lines of such elements as He and N (nitrogen sequence - WN stars) or He, C, O and Si (carbon sequence - WC stars). They are very bright in the UV and therefore were frequently observed by IUE, also at very large distances from the Sun. In that spectral range these object appear, however, substantially reddened by interstellar matter due to their location in the disc of our Galaxy. In this paper we describe results of our studies of UV spectra of WR stars based on low resolution data obtained by IUE. We show how spectral classification of WR stars can be done based on UV spectra alone. We also present physical parameters of WR stars as obtained from low resolution IUE data.