Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: I

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

I is for iron and today possibly the use for the metal may be falling behind the use for the pressing of clothes. The metal is clearly the oldest of the uses, indeed there is even an Iron Age referring to a stage of technological advances where iron was smelted, an improvement on the earlier Bronze Age. The word is first seen in Old English iren, from Proto-Germanic isarn, and probably loaned from isarnon of the Celtic languages and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European eis meaning 'strong'. Hence the idea is this newly smelted metal was much stronger than bronze and appropriately named as 'the strong metal'. Related terms are seen in Sanskrit isirah 'vigorous, strong' and Greek ieros 'strong' and, through the context in which these terms were used, is thought to have been seen as 'the holy metal'.

The other sense of 'iron', that of removing creases from clothing, stems from that metal being used to produce the tool. For much of its life it has been known as a flat iron, and not until 'to iron' was seen as a verb (hence we do the ironing) was it known as an iron.