Understanding Adjectives
Like verbs and nouns, adjectives are a part of speech. Below, we’ll further explain what adjectives are and provide examples.
Examples of adjectives:
red, pretty, costly, ginormous, high-pitched, cheap, colorful, hairy, sleek, tough, fast, shy, ambitious, small, massive, dazzling
What Is an Adjective?
An adjective is a word that describes or modifies a noun. Adjectives can demonstrate size, shape, quality, feeling, and much more. Adjectives help your readers visualize and get a better feel on what you’re writing about. For example, you can write “a car,” or you can write “a shiny, sleek, black car.”
Adjective Order
Adjectives usually appear before a noun. These are called attributive adjectives.
She was awed by the endless ocean.
In some cases, adjectives appear after nouns. These types of adjectives, known as predicative adjectives, follow linking verbs like forms of to be or seem.
The children were asleep.
Classifying adjectives places nouns in a certain category (e.g., political party, running shoes). Descriptive adjectives describe the appearance or quality of a noun. When using both in a sentence, classifying adjectives come after descriptive adjectives.
I bought the black dress shoes before everyone else did.
I bought the dress black shoes before everyone else did.
Additionally, descriptive adjectives tend to follow this order: size, age, shape, color, origin, and material.
The DeMartin family live in an old, big, yellow house.
Examples of Adjectives
Here are a few more adjective examples:
Dorothy and her friends skipped along the yellow brick road.
We watched a funny romantic movie.
The girls drew their aunt a colorful drawing.
When I arrived from vacation, I was surprised to see that my plants were alive.
It was a long and tiresome day.
Including and understanding adjectives in your writing is important because it makes it more colorful and descriptive and helps your readers visualize what you’re writing about. For example, we can say LanguageTool is a text editor, or we can say: LanguageTool is a superior, multilingual writing assistant that checks your text as you write to ensure it is as flawless as possible.