Adjective Word Order

Subscribe to English Grammar Exercises by Email

We use adjective to modify nouns. But, sometimes we use use two or more adjectives together to modify one noun. In this case, we have to know which adjective comes first and which one comes later.  Let's see the following examples.

• Don lives in a nice new house.
• There were four beautiful small square wooden chair in the living room.

Opinion And Fact Adjectives

We usually divide adjective into two parts; one is  opinion adjectives and the latter is  fact adjectives.

Adjectives like new, large,  round,  wooden are fact adjectives. They give us objective information about something (age, size etc.). Adjectives like nice, beautiful are opinion adjectives.  Opinion adjectives usually go before fact adjectives. Let's see the following tables.

	Opinion Adjectives	Fact Adjectives	Noun
a a an a	nice delicious intelligent beautiful	sunny hot young large square wooden	day chili sauce man chair

Fact Adjective Order

Sometimes we use two or more fact adjectives to modify one noun. Very often (but not always) we put fact adjectives in this order.

	Size	Age	Color	Origin	Material	Noun
a a a an a	tall big small large	young old new	brown blue white	Norwegian	plastic wooden cotton	man eyes bag table song shirt

Adjectives of Size, Length, Shape, And Width

Adjectives of size and length (big / small / slim / tall / short / long etc.) usually go before adjectives of shape and width (round / fat / thin / wide etc.). Let's see the following example.

• a large round table  
• a short fat girl
• a long winding road
• a small new house

Adjective Word Order Exercise

Put the adjectives in the bracket into the correct position. Example : a beautiful chair (wooden round)

You write   : a beautiful round wooden chair

1. a good-looking man ( young ) .........

2. a sunny day ( lovely ) .........

3. a beautiful ring ( gold ) .........

4. an old man ( ugly ) .......

5. a modern house ( expensive ) ......

6. a red car ( old/little ) .....

7. long hair ( dark/beautiful )....

8. a metal box ( red / big ) .....

9. an English film ( old ) .......

10. a beautiful wife ( young/Russian ) .....

Answer

1. a good-looking man ( young )  👉 a good-looking young man

2. a sunny day ( lovely ) ......... 👉   a lovely sunny day

3. a beautiful ring ( gold ) .........   👉 a beautiful gold ring

4. an old man ( ugly ) .......  👉 an ugly old man

5. a modern house ( expensive ) ...... 👉 an expensive modern house

6. a red car ( old/little ) ..... 👉 a little old red car

7. long hair ( dark/beautiful ).... 👉 beautiful long dark hair

8. a metal box ( red / big ) ..... 👉 a big red metal box

9. an English film ( old ) ....... 👉 an old English film

10. a beautiful wife ( young/Russian ) ….. 👉 a beautiful young Russian wife

Download the exercise in Google Drive.

Subscribe to English Grammar Exercises by Email

Other Exercises

Reflexive Pronouns

By and Until

Used to + Ing

So and Such

Interrogative Pronouns

Mustn't and Needn't

Below and Under

Present Simple

Active Passive Voice

Question Tags