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Learners' Questions: Adjective order

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Belen in Spain asks: "Which is the correct order for adjectives?"
When using two or more adjectives together, the order is important.
Adjectives are put in the following order:
opinion, size, quality, age, shape, colour, participle forms, origin, material type and purpose
It's a beautiful old Indian carpet.
Joining Adjectives
We can join 2 adjectives from the same group together using and:
It's a beautiful old red and green Indian carpet.
We can join two contradictory adjectives together using but:
It's an old but expensive Indian carpet.
Similar meaning
If two adjectives have a similar meaning, the shorter one goes first:
It's a soft, comfortable chair.
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Transcript
Hi guys! Dan for BBC Learning English here with this week's Learner Question. Find out what it is after this.
OK! This week's learner question comes from Belen from Spain. Who asks, "May I ask which the correct order in adjectives is?" Of course you can Belen. Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Here we go.
When we use two or more adjectives together to describe a noun, the order that we put them in is quite important. For example, we don't usually say an old Indian beautiful carpet. That sounds weird. It sounds much better say a beautiful old Indian carpet.
As a general rule, adjectives are placed in the following order: opinion, size, quality, age, shape, colour, participle forms, origin, material type and purpose. Did you get that? It's a beautiful old Indian carpet.
If you want to use two adjectives from the same group together, we combine them with 'and'. For example, it's a beautiful old red and green Indian carpet. We can also combine adjectives with but, and this is usually when they have a contradictory meaning. For example, it's an old but expensive Indian carpet.
Finally, if we use 2 adjectives that have a similar meaning, we usually put the shorter one first. For example, it's a soft, comfortable chair.
I hope that answers your question Belen. Thank you very much for writing to us. If anybody else out there has a question for Learners' Questions, then please email us on: [email protected]. Please remember to put Learners' Questions in the subject box and include your name and the country that you're writing from. We can't possibly answer all your questions, guys, because we just get too many, but we promise, we do read all of them. And, of course, you can always go to our website: bbclearningenglish.com for more information on grammar, vocabulary and everything else. Dan from Learners' Questions. I'll see you next time. Say bye-bye. Say bye-bye.
Category
English Languages
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