Spanish Adjective Agreement

Spanish adjectives agree with the noun they modify in gender and number. The endings are predictable; the position is mostly post-nominal but with a small high-frequency exception set.

The four endings

For adjectives ending in -o, you get all four forms:

• un coche rojo (a red car)
• una casa roja (a red house)
• dos coches rojos (two red cars)
• tres casas rojas (three red houses)

Adjectives that don't change for gender

Adjectives ending in -e or a consonant only change for number, not gender.

Note feliz → felices: the -z becomes -c before -es. Same rule for vez → veces, luz → luces. The plural of -z words follows this spelling shift universally.

Nationality adjectives

Nationalities ending in a consonant do add -a for the feminine, and they often drop the written accent.

The accent on the masculine singular (francés, inglés, alemán) disappears in the other forms because the stress pattern no longer needs marking.

Position: usually after the noun

The default is post-nominal.

• la casa blanca (the white house)
• un coche rápido (a fast car)
• una idea interesante (an interesting idea)
• los problemas grandes (the big problems)

This is the opposite of English. Adjectives describing colour, shape, nationality, and most physical or qualitative properties go after the noun.

The BAGS set that goes before

A small set of high-frequency adjectives can go before the noun, and a handful of them shorten in the masculine singular when they do. The mnemonic is BAGS - Beauty / Age / Goodness / Size - the categories that traditionally go pre-nominal in literary or marked positions.

The shortening happens only before a masculine singular noun. After the noun, or in any feminine/plural form, the full ending returns: un hombre bueno, una buena amiga, unos buenos amigos.

Adjectives that change meaning by position

A few common adjectives mean different things depending on whether they sit before or after the noun. The full table is on the word-order page; the headlines:

• un gran hombre (a great man) vs un hombre grande (a big man)
• un viejo amigo (a long-standing friend) vs un amigo viejo (an elderly friend)
• un nuevo coche (a new-to-me car) vs un coche nuevo (a brand-new car)

These aren't stylistic choices, they're semantic ones. Worth memorising.

Worked examples

• Mi hermana es muy alta. (My sister is very tall.)
• Vivo en una casa pequeña. (I live in a small house.)
• Compré dos libros interesantes. (I bought two interesting books.)
• Es un buen amigo. (He's a good friend.)
• Hace un día frío. (It's a cold day.)
• Las mujeres españolas son trabajadoras. (Spanish women are hard-working.)

Common mistakes English speakers make

The big one is putting every adjective before the noun out of English habit: una blanca casa is grammatical but reads as poetic or foreign, not neutral. The second is forgetting that bueno and malo shorten before masculine singular nouns: it's un buen día, not un bueno día. The third is the -z → -c spelling shift in the plural: felices, not felizes.

See also

• The Spanish word order page covers the full meaning-by-position table.
• The Spanish grammar cheatsheet covers the wider A1-B1 foundation.