timida

Esperanto has two words for this and only one of them is home-grown.Timida is a borrowed root, imported whole from Latin timidus. Timema is built: timi, to fear, plus -em-, the suffix of inclination, giving "inclined to be afraid". Both are in the dictionaries, both are understood everywhere, and they mean the same thing.

Which does usage prefer? Timema, and not narrowly. The reasons are worth knowing because they generalise. First, timi is a Fundamento root at rank 196 and -em- is a Fundamento suffix, so timema costs a learner nothing - it is already in their head before they meet it. Timida is a twenty-eighth root to memorise for a meaning the language could already express, which is exactly what the tradition calls a nebezonata neologismo, an unneeded neologism. Second, -em- is productive in a way a borrowed adjective is not: timemulo is a timid person, timemeco is timidity, senti sin timema works, and the whole family falls out of one suffix. Third, timida gets no such family - timideco is possible but nobody writes it.

So why is timida here at rank 2,557 at all? Because this course's frequency list is built from real published Esperanto, and real published Esperanto does use it, particularly in translations from Romance languages where the translator had a cognate sitting in front of them. That is the honest answer: recognise timida when you read it, and write timema when it is your turn. The same test applies to any word ending in a borrowed adjective: kuraĝa is the opposite of both, and modesta is a different thing again - modesty is about not claiming, timidity is about not daring.