love-shy
love-shy adjective: ineffectual at courtship or attaining sexual intercourse.
Adjective
love-shy (comparative love-shier or love-shyer, superlative love-shiest or love-shyest)
- Ineffectual at courtship or attaining sexual intercourse.
Noun
love-shy (plural love-shys)
- A person, especially a man, who is ineffectual at courtship.
Forms of love-shy
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | love-shier |
| comparative | love-shyer |
| superlative | love-shiest |
| superlative | love-shyest |
| alternative form | loveshy |
| Noun | |
| plural | love-shys |
Origin of love-shy
From love + shy. Attributed to late sociologist Brian G. Gilmartin.
Words formed from love-shy
Questions about love-shy
- What does love-shy mean?
- Love-shy means ineffectual at courtship or attaining sexual intercourse.
- What part of speech is love-shy?
- Love-shy can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near love-shy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: love-shy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “love-shy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/love-shy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.