A hybrid club is a new class of golf club whose name comes from genetics to denote a mixture of two different species with desirable characteristics of both, and the term here has been generalized; a hybrid club combines the advantages of an iron and a wood.
For many players, long irons are difficult to hit even with modern clubfaces, due to the low trajectory and very small face of the low-loft clubhead. Players have tended to avoid these clubs in favor of fairway woods, but such woods, having longer shafts, have a different swing mechanic that is sometimes difficult to master. The long shaft of a fairway wood also requires lots of room to swing, making it unsuitable for "punching" out from underneath trees, and a wood clubface is designed to skim over instead of cutting into taller grass, which makes it undesirable for shots from the rough. The answer to this dilemma for many players is to replace the 2-4 irons with hybrids.
