Order of adjectives

James: Hi Dora, you look so excited!

Dora: I’ve been shopping all day! Look, I’ve bought beautiful Italian slim blue jeans!

James: Ha-ha-ha…

Dora: What’s wrong? Don’t they fit me?

James: No, they’re okay. You must say: “Italian beautiful slim blue jeans” … or “slim beautiful Italian blue jeans”?

Dora: or “blue beautiful slim Italian jeans”? I’m confused.

These words can go in many different ways. Which one is correct?

There is only one correct possibility: beautiful slim Italian blue jeans.

Do you know why this is the right answer?

When we use several adjectives before a noun, the adjectives have to go in a particular order.

Of course, your meaning will still be clear if you put the adjectives in the wrong order. It’s not a big mistake.

However, if you want your English to sound natural, you need to use adjectives in the right order.

Let’s start with a simple rule which you can use:

We do not normally use a list of adjectives before a single noun. A noun is usually described by one, two or three adjectives at the most.

E.g.

useful new gadget or lovely white leather sofa

There are opinion adjectives and fact adjectives.

Opinion adjectives such as nice, beautiful, useful or delicious, etc. explain what a person thinks about somebody or something.

Fact adjectives such as tall, thin, new, etc. give us factual information about age, size, colour, origin, material, etc.

Look through the adjectives and divide them into two groups - opinion and fact adjectives.

Now check yourselves.

Generous, boring, smart, useful, lovely, comfortable are opinion adjectives.

Huge, round, white, young, British, gold are fact adjectives.

Remember: the adjective of opinion goes first, and the adjective of fact goes second.

E.g.

They live in a beautiful old house on the edge of the city.

We had some delicious Chinese food with some friends.

Why are you wearing that ugly purple hat?

There’s another simple rule which works well if you don’t know the correct word order:

The adjective with a more general meaning goes first, and the adjective with a more specific meaning goes second.

Adjectives like old, hot or small all have a general meaning, because they can be used to describe many different things.

On the other hand, adjectives like yellow, Spanish or striped are more specific.

For example, if you say a warm wooly sweater, the adjective “warm” is more general.

Many things can be warm, in many different ways: warm weather, warm countries, warm hugs, etc.

“Woolly” is more specific. Generally, something can only be woolly if it is actually made of wool. So, we say: a warm wooly sweater, not a wooly warm sweater.

Some other examples:

He works for a small Australian company.

I love these old black-and-white films.

They bought a new leather sofa for the living room.

Some adjectives are hard to define.

These are called determiners, and they come first in the sentence. This includes:

Articles (a, an, the)

Possessives (my, your, etc.)

Demonstratives (this, that)

Quantifiers (many, few, some, any)

Numbers (one, two)

The full rule for adjective order is quite complicated. Are you ready?

Got that? So we could say, for example:

Dora bought beautiful slim new faded blue designer cotton jeans.

We said before, that we rarely use more than two or three adjectives with one noun.

Remember the simple rules:

Now let’s practise using the rule.

Put the adjectives in the correct order.

1. an exciting new American film

2. a delicious large chocolate cake

3. a small ancient stone cottage

4. a brand new, flatscreen HD TV

5. many golden tiny coins

6. an incredible vintage sports car

7. a beautiful big white bulldog

8. three little plastic plates

9. a lovely old-fashioned wooden table

10. that round antique mirror

That’s all for today.

Hopefully the lesson was useful and informative to you.