hekur

• hekun (Gheg)
• hekër (Gheg)
• ekur

Uncertain. There are various possibilities.

1. a substrate pre-Indo-European word with no recorded or surviving cognates (words for technologies are retained, otherwise we would have expected Albanian to have borrowed the word for iron from one of the many neighbors, invaders or directly from PIE)
2. a substrate word cognate to Old Armenian երկաթ (erkatʿ), via a proto-form with metathesis *herku
3. related to hekë, from Proto-Indo-European *skek- (“to jump, be agile”), thus 'to tremble, shiver', literally 'that which trembles, jingles', with a semantic development similar to kërcej, meaning both 'to jump, dance' and 'to make a cracking sound'.
4. an irregular cognate of Ancient Greek ἄγκυρα (ánkura, “anchor”).
5. from *soikros (Gustav Meyer), akin to Sanskrit सिञ्चति (siñcáti, “to pour out, discharge, emit, shed”)

hekur m (plural hekura, definite hekuri, definite plural hekurat)

1. iron (the metal)
2. clothes iron

• hekë

• Schrader, Otto (1890) Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples: a manual of comparative philology and the earliest culture, translated from the 2nd German edition by Frank Byron Jevons, London: Charles Griffin and Company, page 210