Cowardice is a lack of courage — not the feeling of fear itself, but shrinking back when courage was needed. Fear is what you feel; cowardice is the judgment that you failed to act because of it. It is a hard, blaming word. We talk of the cowardice of staying silent, of running away, of letting someone else take the risk. The person is a coward; the quality is cowardice; the adjective is cowardly. The word is fairly formal. Though actually, people argue about it all the time: not every careful step is cowardice, and calling someone a coward is often unfair. Still, when English uses this noun, it usually means a shameful failure of nerve, not just being scared.