iron

Iron is the heavy grey metal almost everything used to be made of — gates, pans, nails, bridges, ships — and the one that turns orange and flaky if you leave it out in the rain. It is also the hot flat thing you push over a shirt to take the creases out.

Say it in two beats, EYE-un: in British English there is no r sound in the middle at all, and this trips up nearly everyone. It works as a verb too — you iron a shirt, and you iron out the small problems in a plan before anyone notices them. As an adjective it means hard and unbending: an iron will, an iron grip, the Iron Age, an iron fist. Doctors use it for a different thing again, the iron in your blood that you get from meat and green leaves, so a doctor saying you are low on iron is not talking about metal you own. Two phrases worth having: strike while the iron is hot, and too many irons in the fire.

Phrases it lives in

• strike while the iron is hot — act now, while the chance is still there
• too many irons in the fire — too many things going on at once to do any of them well
• iron something out — settle the small difficulties in a plan or an argument
• rule with an iron fist — govern by force, allowing nobody any say

Also practised as

• verbTo press cloth flat with a heated metal base.
• nounA common strong metal that rusts.