gather vs shy

gather

verb
  • To gain; to win. 

  • To grow gradually larger by accretion. 

  • To bring stitches closer together. 

  • To collect molten glass on the end of a tool. 

  • To accumulate over time, to amass little by little. 

  • To haul in; to take up. 

  • To infer or conclude; to know from a different source. 

  • To congregate, or assemble. 

  • Especially, to harvest food. 

  • To collect; normally separate things. 

  • To bring parts of a whole closer. 

  • To be filled with pus 

  • To add pleats or folds to a piece of cloth, normally to reduce its width. 

  • To bring together, or nearer together, in masonry, as for example where the width of a fireplace is rapidly diminished to the width of the flue. 

noun
  • The soffit or under surface of the masonry required in gathering. See gather (transitive verb). 

  • A gathering. 

  • The inclination forward of the axle journals to keep the wheels from working outward. 

  • A blob of molten glass collected on the end of a blowpipe. 

  • A plait or fold in cloth, made by drawing a thread through it; a pucker. 

shy

verb
  • To jump back in fear. 

  • To avoid due to caution, embarrassment or timidness. 

  • (transitive) or (intransitive) To throw a ball with two hands above the head, especially when it has crossed the side lines in a football (soccer) match. To hit the ball back into play from the sidelines in a shinty match. 

  • To throw sideways with a jerk; to fling. 

adj
  • Easily frightened; timid. 

  • Embarrassed. 

  • Cautious; wary; suspicious. 

  • Reserved; disinclined to familiar approach. 

  • Short, insufficient or less than. 

noun
  • In the Eton College wall game, a point scored by lifting the ball against the wall in the calx. 

  • In soccer, a throw-in from the sidelines, using two hands above the head. In shinty, the act of tossing the ball above the head and hitting it with the shaft of the caman to bring it back into play after it has been hit out of the field. 

  • An act of throwing. 

  • A place for throwing. 

  • A sudden start aside, as by a horse. 

How often have the words gather and shy occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )