 English vocabulary word of the day, iron, from EspressoEnglish.net First let's work on the pronunciation. The letter I sounds like in the words item, right, and nice. And the second syllable actually sounds like urn, iron. Iron has two syllables and the stress is on the first syllable, so it sounds like iron. Say it after me, iron. Iron is a type of metal that's often used in construction. One thing about iron is that it can oxidize. The more common word for this process is rust. When iron rusts, it means the outside stops being shiny. It turns orange or yellow and gets kind of ugly. The word iron also refers to a type of home appliance that is used to remove the wrinkles. Wrinkles are lines from clothes and make the clothes flat and smooth. For example, I need to iron my shirt. The clothes are all freshly ironed. We have an expression iron out the kinks or iron out the problems, meaning to resolve or fix the problems or issues. For example, we finally ironed out the kinks in the software and it's ready to launch. One expression you might hear when talking about exercise is pump iron. This is an informal way to say lift weights, like in the picture. For example, he spends a lot of time pumping iron in the gym. Now you know four ways to use the word iron. And you can learn a lot more inside my vocabulary builder course, which will help you express yourself more fluently in English.