We report the fabrication of a lateral ZnO nanowire UV photodetector on a glass substrate using tungsten as the growth barrier to suppress the vertical growth of the ZnO nanowires. Upon UV illumination, the detector current increased by more than 1 order of magnitude. Furthermore, the noise equivalent power and the normalized detectivity D-* of the fabricated lateral ZnO nanowire photodetector were 7.89x10(-11) W and 1.9x10(8) cm Hz(0.5) W-1, respectively.