iron
Definitions
General English
- noun a common grey metal
- noun an object with a flat metal bottom, which is heated and used to make clothes smooth after washing
- verb to make cloth smooth using an iron
Agriculture
- noun a metallic element that is essential to biological life and is an essential part of human diet. Iron is found in liver, eggs, etc.
Cars & Driving
Construction
- A lustrous, malleable, magnetic, magnetizable, metallic element mined from the earth's crust as ore in hematite, magnetite, and lemonite. These minerals are heated together to 3,000°F in a blast furnace to produce pig iron, which emerges from the furnace as 95% iron, 4% carbon, and 1% other elements.
Food
- A trace element vital for many body processes especially formation of haemoglobin in the blood. Available in meat, offal, fish, cereals, pulses and vegetables. vitamin C ingested at the same time as iron-containing foods facilitates absorption in the gut.
Medical
Slang
- noun a pistol or revolver. A slang term of the 19th and early 20th centuries (short for the American ‘shooting iron’) which survives in the pages of westerns and crime fiction. Iron was revived in the 1990s by members of US street gangs.
Travel
- noun an electric household instrument for smoothing the creases from clothes
Electronics
- chemical symbolFe
Origin & History of “iron”
Iron is probably a Celtic contribution to English, but the borrowing took place in the prehistoric period, before the Germanic dialects separated, and so English shares the word with German (eisen), Dutch (ijzen), Swedish (järn), etc. The prehistoric Celtic form from which these all ultimately came was *īsarnon, which some have linked with Latin aes ‘bronze’ and Sanskrit isira- ‘strong’. The ancient Indo-European peoples had already split up into groups speaking mutually unintelligible tongues by the time iron came into general use, so there was never any common Indo-European term for it.
