Adjectives - Order - learn how to order multiple adjectives.

This lesson in the adjectives blog concerns the order in which we use them.

but when several adjectives are used to describe a noun the order is not random and if it’s put in the wrong order the sentence really sounds unnatural because native speakers have been hearing the correct order of all their lives instinctively get it right.

But as a language learner you won’t have this experience available to you to fall back on but here is the generally accepted order of adjectives.

You might want to pause the video here to read them but we’ll see.

Basic order starts with quantity and opinion size quality shape age color material origin and purpose.

And unfortunately I know of no mnemonic which will help you remember those.

Some people actually print the list out and stick it somewhere so they can see it and should point out it is very unusual to have more than three adjectives in a row.

You have a beautiful old Swiss clock which is opinion Asian origin opinion is beautiful I think it’s beautiful.

It is old and it comes from Switzerland 12 shiny red apples a 12 is the quantity a shiny that’s a quality adjective and their red is the color of them or a big brown wooden bridge the size color and material a lovely big metal frying pan.

As you do have four so have opinions.

I think it’s lovely.

It is big is made of metal and it’s used for frying this pan a lovely big metal frying pan and if we tried to put those the wrong way round any of them they would really sound unusual.

So if you said red shiny 12 apples.

That just sounds so weird.

Or should 12 red shiny apples it just doesn’t quite sound correct.

And I’m afraid I just have to accept this and try and get the order correct.

Now if we have two adjectives from the same group we actually put an end between them and we’ll see what we mean here the shop says.

Old and new books.

So we have two from the age category and we’ve put an end in between the blue and orange house.

We have two from the color category.

Or we can have of course different categories as well.

So our old black and white television.

So we have an age and color and color so we write it like this our old black and white television and another one with different categories.

A big wooden and metal bridge.

So we have size with two material groups.

Now if we have three or more adjectives in the same group we treat it almost like a list and many adjective groups are not suited to this type of use.

So if we had say shape you couldn’t describe something as being round and triangular and rectangular and flat it just doesn’t make sense.

But groups like Color and material does make sense as we’ll see the red white and blue house to red white and blue all come from the color group and we treat it like a list.

Red comma white no comma and blue and if we have other groups with it we’ll have the big old wooden plastic and metal bridge too old a big and old come from different groups and we just have that with blanks as usual.

And then the wooden plastic and metal we treat like a list we have the big old wooden comma plastic and metal bridge and no comma between big and old and old and wooden.

And then at the end before and might look a bit strange but it is the way it is used if you read lots of books and things you will see that this is how it’s used.