Adjective order in English: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose

Here is a sentence you will never hear and can never forget: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Eight adjectives, one noun, and every English speaker on earth agrees on the order. Swap any two of them - a little lovely old knife, a French green knife - and the phrase does not become slightly worse. It becomes wrong, instantly, to every native ear in the room.

Now ask one of those native speakers what the rule is. They do not know. Most of them do not know there is a rule. They have been obeying it since they were three years old, perfectly, without once being taught it, and they will look at you as if you have asked them to explain how they grow hair. This page gives you the rule they never learned, and then the shortcut that matters more than the rule.

The order

Opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Then the noun.

Nobody uses all eight slots at once outside a grammar page. What matters is that whichever adjectives you do use keep their relative order:

• a lovely old house (opinion before age)
• an old wooden door (age before material)
• a small round green box (size, shape, colour)
• a nice hot cup of tea (opinion first, always)

Determiners and numbers sit in front of the whole line: the three lovely little houses, never lovely the three little houses.

Why native speakers never get it wrong and never know it

The order is acquired, not taught. English-speaking children have it fixed before they start school, because they have heard tens of thousands of noun phrases and every single one followed the pattern. What they end up with is not knowledge but reflex: green French knife sounds right, French green knife sounds broken, and the speaker could no more tell you why than they could tell you why a wrong note sounds wrong.

This has a practical consequence for you as a learner. Native speakers are useless as a source for this rule. They can tell you that your phrase sounds odd; they cannot tell you why. The rule lives on pages like this one, and in your own ear once you have read enough English for the reflex to form.

One aside, because it is the best-known "exception" and it is not really one. By the adjective order, the wolf in the children's story should be the bad big wolf: bad is opinion, big is size, and opinion comes first. He is the big bad wolf because English has an even older rule about vowel patterns - the one that gives you tick-tock, zig-zag and ding-dong, where the i sound always comes first - and when the two rules fight, the sound rule wins. You do not need to learn that one. You already know a language obeys rules its speakers have never heard of; this is just the second example.

Commas and and

Adjectives from different slots take no comma, because their order is fixed: a lovely little old house. You cannot reorder them, so nothing separates them.

Adjectives from the same slot are equals: their order is free, and because it is free, they take a comma or and:

• a long, boring film (two opinions - a boring, long film works too)
• a black and white photograph (two colours)
• a cold, wet morning (two opinions about the weather, both fair)

The test is and. If and fits naturally between the adjectives, they are equals and take a comma. A long and boring film - fine, so the comma is right. A lovely and little house - strange, so no comma. English is not often this tidy; enjoy it here.

The shortcut that actually matters

You will never write eight adjectives in a row, and if you write four you should stop and rewrite the sentence. Here is the whole rule as it applies to real English:

1. Opinion first. Whatever you think of the thing - lovely, terrible, strange, nice - goes at the front of the line. A lovely old car, never an old lovely car.
2. Purpose last. An adjective that says what the thing is for - sleeping bag, coffee cup, running shoes - is welded to its noun and nothing gets between them. A warm sleeping bag, never a sleeping warm bag.
3. Never more than three. Two adjectives is normal English. Three is the ceiling. Past three, move the information after the noun: a little old knife from France with a silver handle reads like English; a little old French silver knife reads like an exercise.

Everything between opinion and purpose - size, age, shape, colour, origin, material - follows a single drift: the more the adjective describes what you think, the earlier it comes; the more it describes what the thing physically is, the closer it sits to the noun. Lovely is entirely your opinion, so it goes first. Wooden is a plain fact about the object, so it goes last-but-one. When in doubt, put the fact next to the noun and the feeling at the front.

Common mistakes

Ranked by how often learners actually make them.

1. Opinion after size. A big lovely garden should be a lovely big garden. Your opinion goes first, whatever it is.
2. Colour before age. A black old coat should be an old black coat. Age beats colour, every time.
3. Material before origin. A wooden Chinese box should be a Chinese wooden box. Where it comes from goes before what it is made of.
4. Breaking up a purpose adjective. A sleeping warm bag should be a warm sleeping bag. The purpose adjective and its noun are effectively one word; everything else stands in front of the pair.
5. A comma between different categories. A lovely, little house should be a lovely little house. Commas belong between equals only.
6. Too many adjectives. A beautiful big old round brown leather chair is grammatically fine and stylistically dreadful. Pick the two that matter and move the rest after the noun or cut them.

Practice

Put the adjectives in brackets in the correct order. Answers are below.

1. a ___ table (wooden / little / lovely)
2. an ___ coat (black / old / warm)
3. a ___ bag (sleeping / blue)
4. a ___ film (boring / long) - and does it need a comma?
5. a ___ cup (coffee / white / small)

Answers: 1. lovely little wooden 2. warm old black (opinion, age, colour) 3. blue sleeping (purpose stays next to the noun) 4. long, boring - with a comma, because both are from the same slot 5. small white coffee

Adjective order tells you where words go before the noun; when you want to compare the things themselves, you need comparatives and superlatives. And the little words in front of the whole line - a, an, the - have rules of their own on the articles page.