Adjectives in the English sentence: rules and examples

In Russian, the order of adjectives rarely matters. The native speaker of English also does not consider the chaotic order of words to be a gross mistake, but she can easily recognize a foreigner in a speaker if he begins to build the sentence in the way that is familiar to him. The order of adjectives in the English sentence is a simple but practical topic that is often neglected, for obvious reasons, by beginners, but which professionals simply cannot ignore. To determine the order in which adjectives should be arranged, it is important to begin to understand what categories they generally fall into.

Subjective and objective adjectives

This rule is quite simple and works if in a sentence no more than two adjectives belong to one noun.

If it is simpler: before describing an object, you should first give it your own assessment, and then name the known actual property that can be verified.

More complicated cases

Of course, it is impossible to always build sentences and describe objects and phenomena using only two adjectives. In Russian, people often use whole descriptive chains, for example: "a warm, pleasant, clear, sunny, long-awaited summer day." As a rule, few people in such cases care about the order of adjectives. In English sentences, it’s no easier to do without such chains, but you have to smash your head.

1. In the first place should always be an adjective describing the overall quality of the subject. For example, its price, condition, the most important characteristic: new - new, broken - broken, expensive - expensive, cheap - cheap.
2. The following is an adjective describing the size: giant - giant, big - large, medium - medium, little - small, wee - tiny, wide - wide, narrow - narrow.
3. Then you need to specify the physical characteristics of the subject: fragile - fragile, soft - soft, hard - hard, strong - strong.
4. In fourth place in the series of adjectives in the English sentence in order should be an indication of the shape of the subject: round - round, sqare - square, right-angled - rectangular.
5. After that, you can and should say about the age of the subject: old - old, young - young.
6. Then follows an adjective indicating the color: yellow - yellow, black - black, blue - blue, white - white. This also includes indications of shades and the words dark and light - dark and light.
7. An equally important element in the narrative chain is the origin of the subject or phenomenon: Russian - Russian, Spanish - Spanish, Asian - Asian.
8. In eighth place is an indication of the material from which the item is made: glassy - glass, iron / ferric - iron, ceramic - ceramic.
9. And last, but not least, an adjective explaining why the subject is needed: clearning - washing / cleaning, writting - intended for writing, reading - for reading.

The fourth and fifth paragraph of the list, if necessary, can be interchanged. But the rest is better to remember in strict order, especially for those who want to speak like a foreigner.

Examples of use

Here are a few lines where you can trace the order of adjectives in a sentence in English.

• New (1) big (2) soft (3) square (4) wooden (8) chair - a new large soft square wooden chair.
• White (6) Asian (7) ceramic (8) tea (9) service - white Asian ceramic tea set.
• Scary (subjective adjective) giant (2) young (5) black (6) hound - scary, huge young black hunting dog (hound - hound).

Writing your own phrases, descriptive chains and sentences with a lot of definitions can be a good exercise in order of adjectives in an English sentence.

To summarize

Examples of the order of adjectives in the English sentence show and prove that, despite the fact that Russian-speaking English seems chaotic and unusual, it still has a strict structure and system of rules. Like any other, this rule is easy to learn if you try to apply it in practice, find confirmation in books and analyze someone else’s, competent English.