Even-up words and their variants

Abstract

Inspired by OEIS sequence A377912, which consists of the nonnegative integers in which every even digit (except possibly the last) is immediately followed by a strictly larger digit, we define even-up and odd-up words over an alphabet of size~$k$ via similar constraints. We introduce and analyze weak and cyclic variants of these words, deriving explicit generating functions for all eight resulting classes. We then study Catalan words under analogous restrictions. Our results provide new combinatorial interpretations for many integer sequences, including the Motzkin numbers, the Riordan numbers, and the generalized Catalan numbers.