Adjective Before Noun
We sometimes use more than one adjective before the noun:
- I like big black dogs.
- She was wearing a beautiful long red dress.
What is the correct order for two or more adjectives?
1 The general order is: opinion, fact:
- a nice French car (not 'a French nice car')
('Opinion' is what you think about something. 'Fact' is what is
definitely true about something.)
2 The normal order for fact adjectives is size, age, shape, colour,
material, origin:
- a big, old, square, black, wooden Chinese table
3 Determiners usually come first, even though they are fact
adjectives:
- articles (a, the)
- possessives (my, your...)
- demonstratives (this, that...)
- quantifiers (some, any, few, many...)
- numbers (one, two, three)
Here is an example with opinion and fact adjectives:
| adjectives |
noun |
| determiner |
opinion |
fact |
| age |
shape |
colour |
| Two |
nice |
old |
round |
red |
candles. |
When we want to use two colour adjectives, we join them with
'and':
- Newspapers are usually black and white.
- She was wearing a long, blue and yellow dress.
These rules are not always rigid. Consider the following conversations:
Conversation 1
A 'I want to buy a round table.'
B 'Do
you want a new round table or an old round table?'
Conversation
2
A 'I want to buy an old table'.
B 'Do you want a round old table or
a square old table?'
Adjective After Verb
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