The Order of Adjectives: Why It Matters Where You Put Descriptive Words
If you’ve ever asked yourself why we English-speakers say “The big black hairy dog” instead of “The black hairy big dog,” then this post is for you.
Three years ago, New York Times writer Matthew Anderson posted this image on his Twitter feed, a statement by author Mark Forsyth from his book The Elements of Eloquence that addresses the very quirky nature of adjectives:
Kind of wild, right? Native English speakers follow this ordering of adjectives without even thinking about it. We inherently know to say “the big, fat, smelly, green monster” and we would never say “the smelly, green, fat, big monster.”
Somewhere in the back of our brains, we know that the order matters even if we don’t know why. Ask Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid: is it “poor, unfortunate souls” or “unfortunate, poor souls”? It’s the former, of course. Why? Because the latter statement makes “poor” mean impoverished. Ursula wanted “poor” to mean “pitiful,” so she put it first.
We all do this. We know, roughly, which adjectives should go before which terms and we say them in that order because, well, “it just sounds right.”
Fortunately, for native speakers, not much thought has to go into this ordering. But for those learning English, it can be a real nightmare to figure out. The big question is, does it matter?
Well, yes it does. As noted in the image above, “big, green dragons” are very much a thing that we can wrap our minds around. But “green big dragons” makes us pause and scratch our head. Is “big dragons” a type of dragon we should know about? Are they in a category, different from other types of dragons, like Lindworm dragons, Oriental dragons, or cockatrice dragons? Phrased as “green big dragons,” that’s what we might infer, like saying “green cockatrice dragons.”
And, as noted from the Little Mermaid example, words can completely change meanings if we put them in the wrong order.
Knowing where to place adjectives affects emphasis, as well. If you were to say “a red ornamental vase,” the emphasis is placed on “ornamental,” where we’re describing the type of vase. But if you were to say “an ornamental red vase,” the emphasis is placed on the color red, where red is now the type of vase. Our attention is drawn to the ordering of the descriptive words.
The Order of Adjectives in English
The challenge is, of course, that there isn’t a hard and fast rule that applies to the description of all nouns and sentence structures. However, most grammarians and linguists have determined that, in most cases, English speakers order adjectives in this sequence:
- Opinion
- Size/quantity
- Physical quality
- Age
- Shape
- Color
- Origin
- Type or Material
If you go out of that order, you risk placing emphasis in areas you didn’t intend, you might change the meaning entirely of a word, or you could just end up speaking complete nonsense.
To assist in understanding this quirky characteristic of language, I developed an infographic (because, of course, that’s what I do!)
Purchase/Download this Graphic at The VCG Shop