Abstract. In this survey paper, we present known results and open questions on a proper subclass of the class of regular languages. This class, denoted by W, is especially robust: it is closed under union, intersection, product, shuffle, left and right quotients, inverse of morphisms, length preserving morphisms and commutative closure. It can be defined as the largest positive variety of languages not containing the language (ab) * . It admits a nontrivial algebraic characterization in terms of finite ordered monoids, which implies that W is decidable: given a regular language, one can effectively decide whether or not it belongs to W. We propose as a challenge to find a constructive description and a logical characterization of W.Warning. In this paper, square brackets are used as a substitute to "respectively" to gather several definitions [properties] into a single one.The search for robust classes of regular languages is an old problem of automata theory, which occurs in particular in the study of regular model checking [3]. In this survey paper, we present known results and open questions on a proper subclass of the class of regular languages, introduced a few years ago by the authors in connection with the study of the shuffle product [6,7]. This class, denoted by W, is especially robust: it is closed under union, intersection, product, shuffle, left and right quotients, inverse of morphisms, length preserving morphisms and commutative closure. Furthermore, this class is decidable: there is an algorithm to decide whether a given regular language belongs to W or not. As such, it might offer an appropriate framework for modeling certain problems arising in the verification of concurrent systems.The class W is also interesting on its own and appears in the study of three operations on languages: length preserving morphisms, inverse of substitutions and shuffle product. More specifically, W is the largest proper positive variety of languages closed under one of these operations. It is also the largest positive variety of languages not containing the language (ab) * .⋆ The authors acknowledge support from the AutoMathA programme of the European Science Foundation.