It's pronounced like "I earn" said as one word.

That's on of the niceties of the English language: many words sound identical.
My perception is that there is no difference in the pronounciation of ion and iron, when native speakers speak.
There is a huge difference when HR3 announces the annual Iron Man event in Frankfurt as Eirren Man.

Ion would be pronounced like "I On" as opposed to "I earn".

One thing that tickles me that Germans say a lot are things like "Adwantage" or "wideogame" :)

I can help with US pronunciation: the word 'iron' is pronounced like the two English words 'eye-earn'.
It reminds me of the pronunciation of the football player's name, Brett Favre(pronounced 'Farv').

I believe the 'r' is not pronounced at the end of a word,in practice this does not happen in the northern parts of England , in Scotland or Ireland.I don't know about Wales. You will not be considered wrong if you pronounce the 'r' on all occasions.

@John: You beat me to it!
@Werner: Perhaps they're close in BE, but they're not so close in AE (ion = eye-on, iron = eye-earn with a much harder 'r')

@Werner: just checked Pons Kompaktwörterbuch -- the phonetic spelling is exactly the same for both words! I guess this shows a BE preference of pronunciation in Pons.

Back in University, my English Teacher (BE native) instantly startet to sing a Bob Marley song whenever someone pronounced iron with "r" ...

<sing>Iron like a Lion in Zion</sing>
(All three words, Iron, Lion, Zion sound the same ...)

http://www.bobmarley.com/songs/songs.cgi?iron

In Ireland we pronounce the 'r'.

ion ['ai-"ahn]
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?ion00001....

iron ['ai-rn]
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?iron0001....

Vermutlich wollte dirk aber eher wissen, ob die Aussprachevariante i-ron (also wie I, Ron - ich, Ron) richtig oder falsch ist.
Die ist falsch, dirk. Man sagt zwar I-Ron-ic für ironic, aber irgendwas zwischen I earn und I an für iron. Markus <de> hat es jetzt am anschaulichsten verdeutlicht.

@RiKo: Danke, aber man sollte betonen, dass mein Lehrer ein BE native war. Die Amis, die ich kenne, sprechen ein hörbares "r" (und m-w.com bestätigt dies)

I forgot to add that in 'iron',I would pronounced the 'r'. I do in 'irony' .
Many southern English would not,but then I haven't heard them say 'round and round the rugged rocks, the ragged rascal ran' or 'If ye can say it's a bra bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht,ye're allricht,ye ken

@Markus <de>: Gern geschehen. Aber man spricht dieses r doch nicht als den ersten Buchstaben in der zweiten Silbe des Wortes aus (wie in Ron), sondern als den zweiten Buchstaben (wie in earn mit hörbarem r vor dem n). Oder bin ich da jetzt auf dem falschen Dampfer?

In the US, according to m-w, iron is pronounced /ˈaɪ.ɚn/ or /ˈaɪrn/ and ion /ˈaɪ.ən/ or /ˈaɪ.ˌɑn/ (this only corresponds to eye-on if you are cot-caught merged or from the relatively small area where 'on' is pronounced /ɑn/).

(Ad Pons: I don't think the pronounciations of dictionaries that put phonemic transscriptions in square brackets should be trusted anyway.)

@RiKo: Hmmm ... ja, für AE stimmt das wohl (siehe den Beitrag von "Not Ron"), für BE nicht, da hört man genauso viel "r" wie in Lion und Zion ;-) (laut Werner und meinem damaligen Lehrer)

/'a?.?n/ or /'a?rn/ and ion /'a?.?n/ or /'a?.??n/

???: get firefox, it's safer anyway.

@ThomasJ: Yes, agreed -- I've seen some other 'suspect' pronunciations in Pons. (From the same page -- they also put a schwa in the word iris - 'eye-uh-ris'.)
@Markus: I agree with Not Ron, as far as AE goes -- and also stand by 'eye-earn'.

I believe the "i-ron" issue was discussed, amongst other things, in this rather entertaining thread:
  related discussion:Champions League - Sat1

Wow, such a lot of answers! Thanks! So, if I understand correctly, some pronounce the "r", so to speak, a little bit, but AFTER the o (or whatever it may sound like), and others don't pronounce it at all (rhyming with ion, lion, Zion).
So the typical German pronunciation "I-ron" od "I-ren" seems to be definitely wrong ...

@John: >One thing that tickles me that Germans say a lot are things like "Adwantage" or "wideogame" :)
That is due to a faulty operation of our German brains. We have learned the soft English "w" and know that it is used whenever we would speak it hard:
Ich will [v] -> I will [w], er war [v] -> He was [w], Wasser [v] -> water [w], etc.
So we tend to do a little to much and say "wideo", "adwantage", etc :-)

BTW: I don't know why, but most Germans obviously cannot pronounce "Elizabeth" correctly. I guess 60 of 100 say "Elithabess". Especially in the German version of "The Waltons"!

@ John
Please enlight me how to pronounce advantage and videogame properly.

@Gaby: Mit [v] wie beim deutschen "Wasser", nicht mit [w] wie beim englischen "water" (ich glaube das meinte John).

I don't let the occasional adwantage bother me, but I do find it silly when people say "In my willage ve ate vaffles for breakfast." (At least two people I have met (one Swiss, one German) have made the different mistakes in the same sentence.)

Here in the UK Midlands we are more likely to pronounce the word "iron" as "eye-yun". If you analyse it closely, most English people would actually say something closer to "eyn" [as softer version of the German word for the number one].

Where I grew up, we pronounced it 'arn'.

@"..": Wie gut dass Agnelsachsen im Deutschen keine Ausspracheprobleme haben...

ze Bawarian - Touche! And if you knew me, you would probably say "Look at silly little .., can't keep the articles straight!" (My pronounciation is actually very good, though.)

Just adding my two cents worth while I wait for my MS Office updates to install (SO slow): I pronounce ion and iron pretty much the same - perhaps a slight tendency towards i-en for the latter. I don't believe I've met an Australian who pronounces it differently.

Iron is pronounced very similiarly to German "Eiern"
at least in the USA. I know it is not logical. The R is pronounced as if it were directly before the N. Strangely "ironic" is pronounced more or less as it is spelled, as someone else already pointed out.

@TRS
I'm not defending Pons or anything else, but there is a schwa in the word iris - 'eye-uh-ris' - where I come from in the UK :-)
And in "Irish".
Can't say for other regions.

I do not pronounce the 'r' in "iron", and the 'o' in it is just a short null vowel. If there were a German word "Eien", I would pronounce that in essentially the same way as I pronounce "iron". This is quite different from the pronunciation of "ion", in which the 'o' is a definite short 'o', as if saying "eye-on".

Some people say I sound posh. Others say I sound like a BBC news reader. Either way, I think I'm pretty close to standard British "RP".

By the way, I think Pons is wrong in this case.

Solitudinarian expressed what I was thinking: in large parts of the US south and mid-west, iron is pronounced "arn". (I grew up with this pronunciation, too, but I think I have shaken it off.)

Since this version tends to be considered "non-standard", it doesn't make it into the dictionaries. But if you travel in those parts, you need to be able to understand it.

@George: Actually, that is probably the pronunciation m-w describes by 'Irn (/ˈaɪrn/), which has the same sound as "fire" or "myre"; and /aɪ/ is (stereotypically?) realized as [ɑ] or [a] in the south.

*mire*
or tire, hire etc.

Hurray for J. Paul Murdock from the UK Midlands! In New England (Boston area) I grew up calling the thing an "eye-yun" too. We are known not to like r's anyways (we call them "ahs"). We pahk ah cahs and eye-un ah clothes.

Hey, Owenmem! Fellow Bostonian!

I think it's funny how German speakers mispronounce "iron".

But it's probably even more funny to hear me scream out "Eiern!" periodically.

Next time, just say, in lovely Hochdeutsch (with a perfect accent, needless to say): "Diese Aussprache geht mir auf die Eiern!"

Courtney

"geht mir auf die Eier" (no "n")

but I'D never pronounce the "r" in iron!

iron...always with r.

As a speaker of posh southern English, I suppose I should add my view on this.


Personally, I pronounce "iron" to rhyme with "Zion" and "lion", and I pronounce "ion" exactly like "eye on".

Agree with Solitudinarian - my favorite pronunciation for "oil" is "a:rn" ...

... and "oil" sounds pretty much like "awel" ...


;-)

Oooops, sorry - it's "a:rn" for "iron", of course ... I'm not THAT crazy ...

:-/

haha, I was gonna say somethin' there, woody...

The "r" ist not pronounced
Anne

In Baltimorese (dialect used in Baltimore, Maryland), it's

"arn" [open o + retroflex r + n]

for the noun, adjective and verb.

@Hanna:

Well ...?

"there is a schwa in the word iris - 'eye-uh-ris' - where I come from in the UK :-)"

Hmmm, da Iris mein Name ist würde ich den schon sehr gerne richtig aussprechen können. Ich verstehe aber leider noch nicht, wie genau es richtig ist.

Kann mir jemand erklären, was genau beim Aussprechen verschwindet?

(Übrigens, den Begriff "Schwa" hab ich erst mal nachschlagen müssen:
Wikipedia zum "schwa":

Das Schwa ist die Schwundstufe eines vollen Vokals, wie sie in unbetonten Silben vorkommt. Sie wird im Internationalen Phonetischen Alphabet mit dem Buchstaben ə dargestellt. Das unbetonte 'e' am Wortende wird im Deutschen i.d.R. als Schwa realisiert. )

Danke für Eure Hilfe! :)

haha, no, I just thought "my favorite pronunciation for "oil" is "a:rn" ..." was a bit out there, but you corrected it before I could point it out. :P