Adjective order

Grammar » B1+ Grammar lessons and exercises » Adjective order
Exercises Explanation Downloads
  • Exercises: 1 2 3

    Adjective order

    Exercise 1

    Choose suitable adjectives to complete the sentences below.

    1Do you like my  new shoes?

    2Matt is an intelligent old man.

    3They use new  wooden spoons to eat.

    4I've bought some red cups for the party.

    5You need to wash that old blanket.

    6Have you seen my blue running sweatshirt?

    7I've bought a antique Egyptian statue.

    8The victim is a middle-aged black man.

    9The murder weapon was a long metal bar.

    10She is a young woman.


     

    Exercises: 1 2 3

  • Adjective order

    Educational infographic detailing the correct order of adjectives in English grammar, labeled with the mnemonic 'OSASCOMP' representing opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose, with examples for each category.

    Download full-size image from Pinterest

    Native speakers often learn how to order adjectives intuitively through years of exposure and practice rather than through formal study. They develop a natural sense of what ‘sounds right’ without necessarily knowing the rules that govern these choices. However, for students of English as a second language, mastering the order of adjectives can be quite challenging. As you can see in the grammar chart above, there’s a handy mnemonic (OSASCOMP) that can help you remember the usual sequence. Fortunately, it’s rare that you’ll need to use many adjectives together, and when you do, the context of the sentence often guides the correct placement, making communication clear and effective even if the order varies slightly.

    Opinion vs fact adjectives

    Opinion adjectives express what the speaker thinks of something, e.g. nice, handsome, brilliant, etc., and fact adjectives give us information about something such as age, size, colour, material, etc.

    When we use two or more adjectives together, opinion adjectives usually go before fact adjectives.

    • They live in an amazing modern attic. 
    • She’s a beautiful young woman. 

    Order of fact adjectives

    When we use two or more fact adjectives together, they normally go in the following order:

    1 OPINION: wonderful, terrible, lovely

    2 SIZE: small, huge, tiny

    3 AGE: ancient, new, young

    4 SHAPE: round, square, oblong

    5 COLOUR: green, bright, pale

    6 ORIGIN: Victorian, American, Turkish

    7 MATERIAL: wooden, metallic, cotton

    8 PURPOSE: racing, sleeping, cooking

    Determiners

    Before any adjective-noun combination, we use one or more determiners, which may include articles, possessives, demonstratives, numbers or quantifiers: a, the, some, any, this, my, her, one, ten, many, few, etc.

  • We are working on this!

    We're developing a NEW LEARNING PLATFORM with a subscription plan that includes additional features at an affordable price. One of those features will be PDF downloads.

    Learn more!

Related tests: