Forming comparative and superlative modifiers | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hey Garian, so last time we talked about Raul the Penguin and how he was happier than another penguin, Cesar. Um, but I want to talk today about how to form the comparative and the superlative. You know how to compare, how to say something is more than or most. Uh, in an unfamiliar situation, if you're looking at a word for the first time or you're encountering, you're trying to figure out how to make a word comparative or superlative. You know, to be like, "Oh well, I've got this word, I've got this word cute. Like, that's a cute little baby penguin." But how do I say that it is more cute than another animal?

Well, there's a shorthand for that. Sometimes you can say more cute, certainly, but you could also say cuter, and you could furthermore say cutest. It turns out that there are a series of sound rules in English that kind of govern the way that we choose to make these words go. So, I'll show you each of them in turn.

So, okay, we've got this little table that I'm building here, and we've got a description of how it looks in the comparative and how it looks in the superlative. If you take a word like cute, then words like cute, um, have what we call one syllable, one word sound. Cute, so a word like cute, uh, that is one syllable and ends in an e. So, one syllable ends in an e, all we have to do to make it comparative is, uh, add an R. So, add R and that gives us cuter for the comparative. All you have to do is add -est and you get the word cutest.

But what if you've got a word like big? If you tried to add just R to that, it would just look like bigger; or -est to that, it would look like biggest. And that’s not really how we would form these words in standard English. That doesn't work because they're kind of inconvenient to say. We like to have, um, vowels in between some of those consonant sounds between the B and the G and the -est.

So what you do if it's a one syllable and it's only got one vowel in the middle, like I like that one vowel and it ends in a consonant, like a -g, then what you do is double the consonant and add -er. So this word big ends in a g, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to, for the comparative, say big and then I'm going to double that g. I'm going to use it twice: bigger, like that, and then add the -er. Likewise, for the superlative, same thing. So, you double the consonant at the end of the word and then you add -est. So it becomes bigg, and then I double this consonant sound. So, b-i-g-g-e-s-t, biggest.

And for words like short and sweet, oh, I should clarify, uh, for this one for big, um, this should end in one consonant, so big. There's only one consonant there. Uh, because for words like short and sweet that have one syllable but either have two vowels like sweet does, so it's e and e, or two consonants at the end, what you do is you just add -er. So shorter or sweeter, uh, and for the superlative form add -est, so shortest or sweetest.

And now we're getting into the weird stuff. So if you take a word like shiny, which is two syllables and it ends in -y, then what you have to do is change -y to an -i and you add -er. So shiny becomes shinier. See how this -y becomes an -i here? Same thing for superlative; the y becomes an -i and then you add -est, so shinest.

Now if you've got a word like magnificent, magnificent, this is a four-syllable word. It means like super huge, super great, super wonderful. Um, you've got a word like that; it's a little bit too big to be adding more parts to the way that standard American English works. So you wouldn't say magnificent-er or magnificent-est; it just sounds unwieldy because the word's already pretty long.

So if you've got a two or more syllable word that doesn't end in -y, then you just have to add the word more to the beginning. So more magnificent and most magnificent.

So, let's say that you're encountering a word you've never seen before, uh, and in a sentence you have to compare the, uh, let's say the word is blury. I don't know what it means, probably something gross. Um, so if we want to compare two really gross meals, you know, like a steaming pile of, I don’t know, dog food covered in flies, or, uh, you know, a plate of ancient cheese that's like 3,000 years old; you got to eat it, gross.

Uh, which one is grosser? But you have to describe them using the word blury, this word we've never seen before. Well, what do we know about blury? Well, it's got two syllables, blur, so that automatically crosses out any of this stuff. Um, it does end in a -y, blury, so we know that it's probably going to behave like shiny, like the word shiny because it got two syllables and it ends in -y.

So, um, I'm going to say that the dog food is less blury and the cheese is blurrier. In fact, this cheese is the bluriest food on the planet. Now don't get me wrong; I love a good stinky cheese, but this one in particular, this 3,000-year-old cheese, super blury. In fact, I'm just going to go so far as to say it is the bluriest. You can blury anything. Dave, it out.