Welcome to our Order of Adjectives Exercises. Let’s learn how to use adjectives in the correct order to describe people and things when using more than one adjective. It is important to learn how to use them properly at this expanding stage of English where there is more focus on academic tasks and language functions. These Order of Adjectives Exercises show you how we use most adjective in front of nouns to describe people and things after determiners and numbers.
Instructions
- Watch the video about order of adjectives
- Find the matching words.
- Complete Exercise 1-3
- Read the examples if you need help.
We can use most adjective in front of nouns to describe people and things after determiners and numbers.
- She had a beautiful smile.
- He bought a cup of black coffee.
- There were six new students in my class this year.
We often want to add more information to a noun, so we can use more than one adjective. We use this order for adjectives:
size → age → shape → colour →nationality → material
size | age | shape | colour | nationality | material | noun |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
old | wooden | house | ||||
big | red | bus | ||||
antique | Chinese | vase | ||||
small | round | copper | coin | |||
large | black | cat | ||||
huge | square | cheese | sandwich |
Adjectives belong to six main types, but it is unlikely to use all six types in the same sentence.
We don’t usually use more than three adjectives to describe a noun.
- The man was wearing an old black leather jacket.
- The house had a big red wooden door.
- He found an old round copper coin on the beach.
If we want to use an age adjective and a nationality adjective, we put the age adjective first.
- We met some young Spanish boys.
- I bought a new German car.
Similarly, a shape adjective normally comes before a colour adjective.
- I have a round green table in my bedroom.
- They carried the square white window frame into the house.
Note that material means any substance, not only cloth.
- The man left a large black plastic bag on the beach.
- The women wanted a large gold chain for her birthday.
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