An Introduction To Adjectives In English

Adjectives are one of the main word groups in English and they will help you add a lot of detail to your sentences. Learning a few simple adjectives can really change how much you can say so they are certainly worth spending time on.

So let’s look at what they are and how they work.

What Are Adjectives?

Adjectives are simply describing words and they are used to modify nouns (and also sometimes pronouns). They give us more information about a person, place or thing.

They are going to allow you to create much more detailed sentences

Where Are Adjectives Placed In Sentences?

You will normally find adjectives before a noun, however, you can also find them after some verbs. (link verbs)

I am not really going to go into detail about link verbs here, I will just be looking at how they relate to nouns. 

Ordering Adjectives When You Have More Than One

It is pretty common to use more than one adjective in a sentence. However, there is actually a proper order to how you should use them and you have to follow the rules.

If you just use in them in any order you like, it will sound very wrong to a native speaker.

These will always come before the noun, but the adjectives must always be used in this order:

1. determiner
2. opinion
3. size
4. shape
5. age
6. colour
7. origin
8. material
9. purpose

Of course you do not need to use all of them at once, that would be intense, but whatever you use, you need to make sure it follows the order above. I will give some examples of these types of words below.

Following the above rules a sentence like “The lovely big red tractor” is correct, where as “the red big lovely tractor” is wrong …and native speakers will notice, it will sound painful to them.

Let’s look at some examples of the types of words:

Determiner

I have covered these in their own separate lesson, but basically you always need a determiner when talking about a noun.

Adding the other adjectives below to your noun creates a “noun phrase”, so you almost treat it all as one thing, and the determiner goes before it.

These are going to be words like: a, an, the, my, yours

Opinion

These are words like: good, bad, lovely, beautiful, silly

Size

These are words like: big, small, tall, long, huge

Shape

These are words like: square, rectangular, round

Age

These are words like: old, young, youthful

Colour

These are words like: red, blue, bright, dull

Origin

These are words like: Irish, English, Japanese

Material

These are words like: metal, paper, wooden, silver

Purpose

These adjectives help us understand what the purpose of the noun is, and they are usually words that end in “-ing”

These are words like: walking, running, hiking

This makes more sense when you see it in action, if you take the examples above and pair them with the noun “shoe” you now see how these words give purpose …walking shoe, running shoe, hiking shoe.

If you look around your room you will probably see plenty of items that can be described in this way where there is a “purpose” attached to them. Often we might think that it’s just the name (noun) and sometimes it is, but many times it will be the purpose adjective + noun to create a “noun phrase”  for example a walking stick, or a frying pan.

These can also look like verbs, being used to describe the noun, but it’s not, it’s the “noun phrase”.

Remembering These Rules

Interestingly most English speakers don’t actually know this rule, but they always speak correctly.

We are never explicitly taught the order of adjectives, but we have had so much exposure to the language that we just subconsciously know what sounds right.

This just shows the power of immersion and how if you keep listening, you will learn too. As a learner you can try and remember the rules, but you can also just act like a native and allow immersion to help you get a feel of what order things should be.

I would suggest you mix both. Listen to a lot of English, so you pick things up naturally, but also come back to this page and look at the list above when you are studying sentences so you can consciously see how things are working.

Different Types of Adjectives

Adjectives can also be grouped into types and the two most common are comparative and superlative.

Comparatives:

Comparative adjectives are used to compare two things, or show there is a change in intensity. This would be things like: better, more, less

It can also be things like “this is a bigger house” and although there is only one house mentioned here, the context would suggest it is being compared to another, and the one mentioned is “bigger”

Often you see this more clearly in a sentence that has “than” in it. “This house is bigger than mine”

You may also see two of these adjectives used together using “and”, such as “I was going faster and faster”

You will notice that a large amount of comparatives are just adjectives with –er on the end and in most cases you can create them by doing this. (For example: older, younger, smaller)

Superlatives:

Superlatives are also used to compare things, but usually when there are three or more and you kind of want to say one is “most” or “less” of something.

If we carry on with the example about the “bigger house” …if we wanted to compare this house with all the others we had seen (so more than 3) and wanted to say it was the “most big” (which is incorrect) we could say “This is the biggest house.”  

There are some times when saying the most x or least y will work, but often the adjective will end in –est, such as:  smallest, tightest, oldest and this is how most of them created.

Absolute:

There are a handful of adjectives that are absolute, which means they cannot be compared or the intensity cannot change.

For example, you can’t say that something is more dead.

However, this can all get a bit vague at times as often spoken English will break these rules and there are also different modifiers you use for these types of words, but I won’t cover these here.

You really just need to know for now that some things can’t fall into a comparative or superlative group, and these are called absolute adjectives, or sometimes “upgradable adjectives”

Nouns Can Sometimes Be Used As Adjectives

You will also find that some adjectives are actually nouns. This is pretty similar to what I was discussing with the “purpose adjectives”, where word is added to the noun, and kind of creates the “full name” of the thing, but it’s really an adjective + noun

In the purpose adjectives examples, I used verbs …walking stick …running shoes, but this same principle works with nouns.

For example you can have a “helmet” (a noun) and use other nouns as adjectives to give it more detail, such as motorcycle helmet, bike helmet or space helmet.

These are pretty common and if you look around you will see a lot of them hiding in plain sight.

Conclusion

I have covered quite a lot here and probably made adjectives seem more complex than they need to be.

Just remember that they are words that go before a noun to give them more detail and you should be fine.

You will get their order muddled up, and while that will sound awful to a native speaker, they will understand you so don’t worry too much about it and  just try and use them as best as you can and with time you will get the order correct.

Return to : Beginner English Main Menu