Adjective order | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

So, Grom Marians, if you're a native English speaker, the phrase "French old white house" might seem a little weird to you. If you're not a native English speaker, it might not. This is something that I didn't really know about before I started preparing to teach this course.

Is that there is a specific order that adjectives go in in English. This is something that I think we just pick up as English speakers. But if you didn't grow up speaking English, it gets a little tricky sometimes. So, the question is, in order to make this seam right, what order do you put these adjectives in?

I'm as near about as I can reckon it, making this into the "old white French house." Because there is an order, and it goes like this: determiner, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose—or for short, Dosa scump.

Oh, okay, that's actually kind of a thing. So, ad DOA is a South Indian flatbread, and scump, I'm going to say, is a word for eating. It's not a word; that's a made-up word. But Dosa SCP—um, it sounds like "scarf" to me or "chomp," and both of those are verbs that can denote eating, as well as "scarf" being a garment.

So, Dosa scump, I just want you to imagine sitting down to a delicious South Indian meal and scamping on some dosas. So, Dosa S-C, determiner—that's words like "the" or "an."

Opinion—this is, you know, when you're describing something, there are certain descriptors that not everyone would agree with. You know, if you're looking at a piece of black metal, everyone will be able to agree that it is black. But if you think it's cool-looking or ugly-looking, you know, anything that anyone could conceivably disagree about—that's an opinion.

So, "cool," for example, that would be an opinion. Size—so the cool big old square black. An origin usually can be, you know, where it's from. So let's say "Texan." And then, okay, so we have material. So let's say "leather," 'cause leather can be black.

Then purpose—this is sort of where we would use what's called a participle or a gerundive to determine what the thing is for. So if we were talking about, I don't know, a lawn mower that you ride around on, right? That's called a "riding mower," right?

And the last thing here is the thing itself. So we're looking at, okay, so this thing is the cool big old square black Texan leather riding mower. But frankly, in most normal English sentences, you're probably never going to use more than three adjectives to describe a given thing, like "old white French house."

Now sometimes you might find yourself using more than one adjective that fits into the same category. You know, so you might say "the exciting unparalleled green dragon." You'll notice I put a comma there because when you use two adjectives from the same category—so two opinions, "the exciting" and "unparalleled," you want to separate them with a comma.

But generally, if you're just scooting down the Dosa scump old white French house, you don't need to separate these non-coordinate adjectives from each other. And we'll get more into commas in the punctuation section.

But for now, all you need to remember is Dosa scump. And if you've never had a Dosa, I strongly urge you to look up recipes online, go to a South Indian restaurant, and make and eat this delicious food. And then you're just going to scump on some dosas.

So, determiner, opinion, size, age, Dosa, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, and then the thing—that's the order that adjectives go in in English. Why is this? I have no idea. You know, sometimes language can be really—the word I tend to use is "arbitrary."

You can call it random if you like. The way that we've arrived at this order is just basically through random chance and convention. And what seems to sound right and what sounds right for English isn't always what sounds right for other languages.

For example, the way we're using adjectives here, we're always putting them to the left of whatever they modify: "the exciting unparalleled green dragon." You know, it's all to the left. It's all "old white French house." It's all, you know, on this one side of it.

And other languages don't do that necessarily. So, when you're trying to just throw a bunch of adjectives together on the left side of a noun, this is the order. Just remember Dosa scump and that's how adjective order works in English. You can learn anything. Dve it out.