Study Resource: Order of English adjectives
Here is the order for English adjectives:
Examples of adjectives in each group:
Type of adjective | Description of category | Examples |
|---|---|---|
Opinion | What you think about a thing | favorite, best, worst, greatest, good, bad, cool… |
Size | How big is it? | big, small, tiny, enormous, short, huge, long, heavy… |
Appearance, personality, or other physical qualities | Does it look nice? What is its texture like? How does it behave? What does it taste like? How does it sound? What does it smell like? | beautiful, ugly, fuzzy, smooth, shiny, sharp, bright, dull, wrinkly, messy, neat, sweet, round, hot, silly, charming, mean, brave, noisy, silent… |
Shape (sometimes size) | What shape is it? Some size adjectives (ex: little, narrow, etc.) also give information about shape. | round, flat, little, square, fat, straight, narrow, wide, curvy, 3D… |
Age | How old is it? | new, old, young, old-fashioned, recent, teenage, modern… |
Color | What color is it? | red, brown, blue, dust-colored, rainbow, colorful… |
Material | What is it made of? | plastic, metal, wool, woven, gold, paper, polyester, cloth… |
Type | What kind of thing is it? A lot of these “adjectives” are actually nouns or verbs used to describe something and many of them have a hyphen (-). | button-up (shirt), ball-point (pen), ham (sandwich), Italian (government)... |
Purpose | What is it used for? | wedding (dress), drawing (pencils), business (address), towing (company), teaching (degree), reference (book)... |
