I am neither a native English speaker nor an English teacher, but allow me to share with you the way I learned the English adjective order. Sometimes, the English language uses more than one adjective to describe a noun. You cannot just put them wherever you want. You need to remember that there’s a proper way of putting them in order.
Example: “A big black wolf” You don’t usually say “a black big wolf”. That would sound awkward. Adjectives can be used to describe a lot of things like color, opinion, size and so on. In order to use the adjectives correctly, I suggest that you memorize the following acronym: N-O-S-A-S-C-O-M-P (NOSASCOMP):
“N” for a number (it describes the number of nouns) (one, two, three, four)
“O” for opinion (It describes your judgment or what you think about something) (horrible, ugly, beautiful)
“S” for size (It describes how big or small something is) (huge, tiny, long, tall)
“A” for age (It describes how old or young something is) (old, new, young, ancient, antique)
“S” for shape (It describes the shape of something) (circular, square, triangular)
“C” for color (It describes the color of something) (black, red, blue)
“O” for origin (It describes where the noun is from) (Chinese, Italian, American, African)
“M” for material (It describes what the noun is made of) (wooden, leather, plastic, metallic)
“P” for purpose (It describes where the noun is used for) (fishing, cooking, sleeping, sports)
Usually, English doesn’t use more than three adjectives in a sentence, but here is an example that contains five of them:
"My wife bought (1)two (2)new (3)red (4)cotton (5)night dresses, last night."
I hope it helps!
Hi Nilton, thank you for sharing on this topic. It is certainly very useful for non-native learners who are trying to write and sound natural when using adjectives and need some rule as a starting point. Many native speakers tend to have little trouble using adjectives in the proper sequence as it comes intuitively through repeated exposure.
I would like to contribute to the discussion: we can further categorise opinion adjectives into specific versus general ones. Specific opinion adjectives precede general opinion adjectives. Example: "distinctive (specific opinion adj) bulbous (general opinion adj) design (noun)" sounds natural while "bulbous distinctive design"** just sounds off.
** I got this example from a news article about the Beluga XL cargo plane by Airbus.
Thanks again, Nilton.
Thank you SHL,
I might be wrong, but as far as I can remember from textbooks, nouns that modify other nouns are called adjectival nouns or a noun phrase.
SHL,
Normative grammar is the standard system of rules and principles for speaking and writing a language.
I understand you because I know the English grammar, but I don't know the grammar of my own language, Portuguese.
SHL,
Are your comments based on the normative grammar or just your opinion?
I cannot argue with you about this subject :)
That is an excellent tip but it also emphasizes the fact that we native English speakers have a tendency to be redundant with our use of adjectives.
In the sentence "My wife bought two, new, red, cotton, night dresses..." the fact that she bought them implies they were new unless the topic was specifically about buying used clothing. Another typical example is "My wife just gave birth to a little, baby girl" Here, both adjectives are technically redundant as, give or take a pound or two, all babies are little and all recent births are indeed babies. It's what makes language fun.
