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This is in the spirit of the What is a Word/Phrase™ series started by JLee with a special brand of Phrase™ and Word™ puzzles.

If a word conforms to a special rule, I call it a Shy Word™.

Use the following examples below to find the rule.

Shy Words

And, if you want to analyze, here is a CSV version:

Error: 405 Method Not Allowed
Community
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Engineer Toast
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3 Answers3

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A Shy Word™ is a word ...

... whose letters nestle, so that a part of a letter is tucked up beneath a part of the other letter.

This is most obvious when the sloped stems of the A go under the stems of a V or W, but can still be seen when the right part of the L goes under the curve of a U or an O. Also note how no letters of Shy Words™ have vertical stems except at the beginning or at the end.

This is known as kerning in typography, where some letter pairs have a smaller gap than usual in order to avoid unaesthetic gaps.

There is no CSV version, because ...

... kerning depends on the visual representation and therefore on the font. In earlier instances of the "What is a Word" puzzles, a typewriter font was used for the CSV. Monospaced or typewriter fonts don't have kerning; all letters have the same width in such fonts.

Jan Eglinger
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M Oehm
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    How does this explain PAT being shy, and PATH being unshy? – Sconibulus Sep 06 '16 at 12:44
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    And CLAW being unshy? – Rand al'Thor Sep 06 '16 at 13:03
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    @Sconibulus: Because all letter pairs must be kerned: TH, CL and LA aren't. (Maybe they are technically, because they are moved closer to each other to reduce the visual space, but none of them undercuts the other.) – M Oehm Sep 06 '16 at 13:08
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    +1 for mentioning kerning instead of just "squishing the letters together" – Engineer Toast Sep 06 '16 at 16:00
  • @EngineerToast: Thanks! That's how I noticed the pattern: The Postscript and PDF references use the all-uppercase AWAY to explain kerning. – M Oehm Sep 06 '16 at 16:07
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    Kerning is actually more general. Increasing the space between certain letter pairs (or triples) is also kerning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning#Kerning_values). – LarsH Sep 07 '16 at 01:37
  • @LarsH: yes, I know. That's why I said in my comment that CL and LA are probably "technically" kerned, i.e. in the sense that kerning is a gap adjustment between individual letters. (I probably don't make that clear in the post itself, though. It's hard to find a good line between description and technical accuracy here. If I hadn't mentioned kerning someone would probably have commented: "FYI, That's called kerning!") – M Oehm Sep 07 '16 at 05:16
  • You could say that a "shy" word is a word in which all the pairs of adjacent letters are negatively kerned (again, following the wikipedia article). But yes that is getting technical. – LarsH Sep 08 '16 at 14:13
  • @Rand al'Thor CLAW is not shy, because the A is only underneath part of the W on the right; all the other shy words have a left-and-right-side coverage. – The Jokester May 20 '21 at 14:49
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What I can conclude from the given dataset is that

There has to be at least one perfectly vertical line on either side of the space between the letters in order for a word not to be shy. If that perfectly vertical line is absent, we can call that word "shy".

OK. Let me clarify my answer a bit. Here are the rules.

  1. Letters having a perfectly vertical line are letters like B, D, K etc. (on the left), and H, M, N etc. (on both the sides). Note that there is no letter having a perfectly vertical line only on the right.

  2. Let us name them P-L (ones with only towards the left) and P-B (having on both the sides) letters.

  3. Now if the word has atleast one P-B letter, it is not shy.

  4. And if the word has 2 P-L letters, it is not shy.

  5. And the words having only one P-L letter must have it anywhere but in the first position.

  6. All the rest of the words would be shy.
Rosie F
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Tejasva Dhyani
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In a "shy" word no letters touch a surrounding letter's nearest ends:

For example in a shy word like "AVOW" all ends point away from the other letters' ends, whereas in the non-shy word "SWEAR" the "E" and "A" touch at the bottom, as well as the "A" and "R"

Edit: To make it clearer, you can think of the ends as a letter's "hands". A has two hands on the bottom, L has two hands on the top and bottom, W has two hands on the top. T also has only two hands on the top, because those are the ends that can "reach out" to its surrounding letters.

So "shy" words are words that don't hold hands.

QBrute
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