Intro to the comparative and the superlative | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

So we've got these three penguins: grammarians. We've got Raul, who you may remember from his sweet mohawk. We've got Cesar, and we've got Gabriella, three Magellanic penguins from Argentina, and they are all different amounts of happy. Cesar is a medium amount of happy. Uh, Raul is more happy, and Gabriella is the most happy.

In English, we have a way to compare these, you know, to compare Raul to Cesar or to compare Raul to Gabriella or any combination thereof. We call this comparative and superlative adjectives. And before I get too into the weeds on that, let me just show you what that looks like.

So, okay, we can say Raul—let me put in the accent—Raul is a happy penguin. He's got all the fish he wants; life is good. Raul is happier than Cesar. This is what we call a comparative because we're comparing Raul to Cesar, and we're comparing their happiness levels. Raul has more happiness in him than Cesar does.

However, Gabriella is the happiest penguin. The happiest is something that we call superlative in English. So it's not just a comparison, right? It's not Raul is happier than Cesar. Gabriella is happier than all the other penguins. She is the happiest. She is the happiest; she's the most happy.

So, one way to think about this is that Raul's happiness is slightly larger than Cesar's happiness, but Gabriella's happiness—this double plus—is unbeatably more than both of them. I'm going to use a made-up math symbol: boop! Like super greater than, you know, undisputed. She is the happiest penguin because the comparative is the same thing as saying more. The comparative equals more, and the superlative equals most.

So this is slightly more; this is super much more. Something that's neat about English is you can use the comparative and the superlative for both positive relationships and also negative relationships. So we could say Raul is a happy penguin, and we could say Raul is happier than Cesar. We can also say Cesar is less happy than Raul.

So this is comparative, but it's going the other way, right? Cesar is less happy than Raul. So then we'd use the less than symbol. Gabriella is the happiest penguin, and so for this group of three, Cesar is the least happy.

So you can use the comparative and the superlative forms of adjectives to compare relationships where one thing is more or most than another or others, or relationships where one thing is less or least than others. That's how the comparative and superlative work.

But if you stick around for the next video, I'm going to talk about how to figure out how to form the comparative and superlative when you're looking at a word you've never seen before. Like, what if we made up a word like, like blurfy? What do you do with that? Well, you'll find out next time. In the meantime, you can learn anything. David out.