What is an adjective?
An adjective is a word that describes or modifies a noun or pronoun, telling us more about it, such as big, red, happy or three.
Adjectives answer questions like what kind, which one and how many. They usually come before a noun, as in a tall tree, or after a linking verb, as in The tree is tall. Some adjectives describe qualities, like beautiful or cold, while others show quantity or number, like several and five.
Many adjectives have comparative and superlative forms to compare things. Short adjectives usually add -er and -est, like tall, taller and tallest. Longer adjectives use more and most, like more beautiful and most beautiful. A few are irregular, like good, better and best, and bad, worse and worst.
Adjective order
When several adjectives are used together, native English speakers follow an order, usually opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material and purpose. That is why we say a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, and why a green big house sounds wrong.
Did You Know?
Proper adjectives, formed from proper nouns, are capitalized, like French from France and Shakespearean from Shakespeare.