(Ironically enough, this analysis isn't really ironic at all, except for this sentence.)

So, second things first: I was unsurprised to learn that the vast majority (85%) of you pronounce iron as 'eye-earn' ([ajəɹn] or [ajɚn]), while only 15% of you say 'eye-run' [ajɹən] (and only 9% do so exclusively). The former pronunciation has been this way for centuries, and the fact that some people say 'eye-run' is very likely a peculiarity of people who learned the word first in print and pronounced it according to its orthography. There were no evident patterns, except that several of the 'eye-run' or 'both' respondents do not have English as their native language.

Curiously, there is no strong phonetic reason why this switch should have occurred. The OED tells me that the old pronunciation 'eye-run' became 'eye-uh-run' and then 'eye-earn', but this happened centuries ago. My best guess would be that it has something to do with the R in the unstressed 'earn' syllable; Rs are weird little letters and do all sorts of weird things phonetically. Yet the sounds [ajɹən] occur in perfectly ordinary contexts such as in siren, which is never 'sigh-earn', to my knowledge.

On the other hand, other words with the orthographic sequence 'i-r-o-n' also make the switch, most notably irony, which something like 35% of you (including me!) pronounce as eye-earn-ee at least some of the time. There is of course no etymological connection between iron and irony (which derives from the Latin ironia and ultimately from Greek). The fact that a significant minority of respondents have made the switch, even though there is no strong constraint working against 'eye-run' pronunciations that I am aware of, is really interesting. Of course, while irony is sometimes pronounced in parallel with iron, ironic and other derivatives never are. This is simpler to explain; iron and irony have first-syllable stress, while ironic has second-syllable stress. It wouldn't be a good parallel to say eye-EARN-ic.

Yet, curiously enough, there is another set of words where 'iron' is sometimes pronounced 'eye-earn': environment and its derivatives. These share the feature that the 'eye' syllable is stressed and the 'earn' unstressed. But, in yet another twist, the related word environs is never, to my knowledge, pronounced 'en-vie-earns', but always 'en-vie-runs', even though the syllable with the 'eye' is stressed in all of them. Really, I should have included both environment and environs in the poll, but I didn't think of it until now. Maybe I will do it as a bonus poll, but I don't think there would be much to add in terms of analysis. I strongly suspect that environs would mostly be 'run' oriented, while environment would look more like irony. And just to make things exceedingly complex (at the risk of increasing irrelevancy), the name of the Canadian polling firm Environics is pronounced 'en-veh-RON-iks', certainly never 'en-VIE-earn-iks'. But what do pollsters know about my polls, anyway?

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