How often do you think about adjectives? All the time? Every day? Do you love them? Do you dream about big red unusual German fluffy adjectives?

Trick question: you can’t. However, you can dream about unusually big fluffy red German adjectives. I suppose. I don’t know how, but…

Anyway, an interesting thing I recently learned is that in the English language, word order matters. Okay, I didn’t just learn that, it’s fairly obvious and something we all know. But were you aware that when describing an object using two or more adjectives, those adjectives have a preordained order that you must use them in?

Well, you might have known that. I didn’t. It’s something that we probably all understand subconsciously; take the sentence in the first paragraph. Does it sound right when you say it out loud? Probably not. The second paragraph just flows so much better, and it’s easier to understand the properties of the adjective. If an adjective could be fluffy, or German.

So what is this all-important word order? Well, to quote the Cambridge Dictionary website, “Adjectives which describe opinions or attitudes usually come first, before more neutral, factual ones.”  Specifically, the order goes like this:

1. Opinion (adorable, strange)
2. Size (small, massive)
3. Physical Quality (fluffy, squishy, rubbery)
4. Shape (square, boxy, oblong)
5. Age (young, youthful, elderly)
6. Color (red, blue, monochromatic)
7. Origin (German, Finnish)
8. Material (stone, brick, gelatin)
9. Type (three-cornered, general-purpose)
10. Purpose (cooking, building, washing)

Try it yourself, make up a sentence with lots of adjectives and then see if you instinctively got them in the right order. You probably did, without having to think too hard. This rule can be shaken up if you want to emphasize one particular adjective over another, in which case you’d put it right before the noun. Otherwise, this is how you’d put the descriptive sentence together.

Now you’re an adjective master! …Maybe.