Spanish Adjective Agreement: Endings, Position and BAGS

A Spanish adjective takes the gender and number of its noun:

• un coche rojo - a red car
• una casa roja - a red house
• dos coches rojos - two red cars

The four endings

Adjectives ending in -o have four forms. The noun picks one:

Blue is masculine, rose is feminine and the highlighted letters are the plural, on every example on this page.

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1. 1la casa blanca
2. 2el perro blanco
3. 3el gato negro
4. 4el coche rojo

The ending follows the noun: casa is feminine, so blanca; perro is masculine, so blanco.

The adjective agrees wherever it is, after ser and estar too:

• Mi madre es alta. - My mother is tall.
• Los libros son nuevos. - The books are new.

Adjectives that don't change for gender

Adjectives ending in -e or in most consonants have one form for both genders. They change only for the plural: -s after a vowel, -es after a consonant.

A final -z becomes -c before -es, the same spelling change as vez, veces:

Nationality adjectives

Nationalities that end in a consonant break the rule above: they add -a for the feminine. So do adjectives in -or, -án and -ón.

• Mi madre es inglesa. - My mother is English.
• Mis hermanas son trabajadoras. - My sisters are hard-working.

The accent on francés, inglés and alemán goes as soon as the word grows, because the stress then falls where Spanish expects it. Nationalities in -e do not change for gender (canadiense), and the comparatives in -or stay as they are: mi hermana mayor - my older sister.

Mixed groups take the masculine

When one adjective describes a masculine and a feminine noun together, it goes masculine plural:

• Los chicos y las chicas son altos. - The boys and girls are tall.
• un libro y una revista nuevos - a new book and magazine

One masculine noun in the group is enough.

Position: usually after the noun

Describing adjectives (colour, shape, nationality, most qualities) follow the noun, the opposite of English:

Numbers and quantity words go before, as in English: dos casas - two houses; mucho tiempo - a lot of time. An ordinary adjective put first, una blanca casa, is not wrong but sounds poetic.

Buen, mal, gran: the short forms

A few common adjectives can go before the noun, and then some of them shorten. The French memory aid BAGS (beauty, age, goodness, size) is a loose guide to which ones; the shortening is what matters:

Two rules:

• Bueno, malo, primero and alguno shorten only before a masculine singular noun: una buena amiga - a good friend; unos buenos amigos - some good friends.
• Grande shortens before any singular noun: una gran mujer - a great woman. In the plural it is grandes: unas grandes ideas - some great ideas.

After the noun, the full form always comes back: un día malo - a bad day.

Adjectives that change meaning by position

A few adjectives mean one thing before the noun and another after it:

Before the noun, the adjective tends to give an opinion or a feeling; after it, a plain fact you could check. The word order page has more on where things go.

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Build the forms in the word-build drill below, then sort the adjectives that change.
2. Then noun plurals for the -s and -es rules in full.
3. For more than and the most, see comparatives.