Kilo Lingo

English · Chapter 8 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer

Comparatives and superlatives

How English compares things - bigger, the biggest, more careful, the most careful - the syllable rules and the common irregulars (good, better, best).

The short version

Count the syllables, then pick one ending

One-syllable adjectives add -er and -est, and two-syllable ones ending in -y swap the y for i. Longer adjectives take more and most instead. Never use both at once: more bigger and the most tallest are wrong, and so is more better, because better is already a comparative.

My brother is taller than me.

Tall is one syllable, so it takes -er, and a comparative almost always leads to than.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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Lesson 8 of 24 in this chapter

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