We have exploited a method for the lateral growth of multiple ZnO nanorods between electrodes in solution without the use of a metal catalyst to fabricate high performance field-effect transistors (FETs). This method enables us to directly align overlapped or overlap-free nanowires between electrodes by eliminating the vertical growth components and complex structural networks. The overlap-free ZnO nanorod FETs showed better performance with a mobility of ∼ 8.5 cm(2) V( - 1) s( - 1) and an on/off ratio of ∼ 4 × 10(5) than the overlapped ZnO nanorod FETs having a mobility of ∼ 5.3 cm(2) V( - 1) s( - 1) and an on/off ratio of ∼ 3 × 10(4). All the FETs fabricated in this work showed much better performance than the previously reported solution-based ZnO FETs.