Adjectives in English have a specific order that native speakers use unconsciously. Adjective order includes purpose, material, place, color, form, age, size, and opinion. Incorrectly ordered adjectives sound unnatural to native speakers.
Adjectives are a part of speech that may or may not exist in a language, used in some way to alter the meaning of a noun. English uses adjectives extensively to help describe nouns more specifically. Adjectives in English can be organized into a number of discrete groups, and there is a specific sequence that these groups follow in sentences, known as adjective order.
Adjective order is one of those things in a language that are rarely recognized by native speakers, who assimilate the rules unconsciously and make sure their sentences use the correct adjective order without thinking about it at all. In fact, if you were to ask most English speakers what the order of adjectives is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you, but if you were to present them with lists of adjectives and instruct them to order adjectives in front of a noun, they could easily do it. Adjective order is one of the things that non-native English speakers should be taught, to help their English sound natural to native speakers. Incorrectly ordered adjectives give a sentence a “wrong” feel that native speakers pick up on immediately.
The exact categories that adjectives fall into aren’t written in stone, and different grammatical sources include more or less groups of others. Most have at least six different groups used in adjective order, however, and the sequence tends to be the same.
Directly before the noun come what are sometimes called sentence-making adjectives or purpose adjectives. These are adjectives that directly describe what the noun is for, or help form the complex noun. An example of this would be car racing, where racing is the adjective of purpose.
Before the adjective purpose comes a material description of the noun, if necessary. This adjective tells what the name is made of, like the steel racing car. Before the adjective material there is the adjective of place, which tells where the noun comes from, as in Italian racing cars.
Before the location comes the color, as in the red racing car. Before color is form, as in the elegant racing car. Before the shape comes a description of age, as in the new race car. Before age is size, as in the small racing car. At the beginning of the noun phrase, any adjectives of opinion appear, such as beautiful or best, which describe the noun using subjective terms.
Most of these adjective groups fit the adjective order of a noun phrase very specifically, and putting them in the wrong order will make a phrase sound like the wrong one. For example, if we describe our racing car as the beautiful and elegant Italian racing car, the order of the adjectives fits the rules discussed above and everything sounds right. If, on the other hand, we were to describe it as the elegant Italian racing car, everything is a hodgepodge and the sentence fails. On the other hand, some of the clusters may occasionally be interchangeable in some circumstances, but this is rare enough not to be a problem for the order of the adjectives – and is usually the result of a specific idiomatic expression.
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