shy away from

1. 1.

   avoid having to deal with some unpleasant task

   “I shy away from this task”

   Broaderavoid

Questions about shy away from

What does shy away from mean?

shy away from means "avoid having to deal with some unpleasant task".

Is shy away from a common word?

shy away from is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.