What are adjectives?
Adjectives are words that describe something. Everything has a name and in English names of things are called ‘nouns’.
For example: “The house is beautiful”. The name of the thing is ‘house’ and so ‘house’ is a noun’. The house is described as ‘beautiful’ and so ‘beautiful’ is an adjective.
Other common adjectives and their opposites include:
big – small
tall – short
hot – cold
expensive – cheap
When an adjective comes before a noun we call it an ‘attributive adjective’.
So ‘The beautiful house’, in this sentence beautiful is an attributive adjective.
But when the adjective comes after a noun we call it a ‘predicative adjective’.
So ‘The house is beautiful’, in this sentence, ‘beautiful’ is a predicative adjective.
Coordinate adjectives
What if you want to use more than one adjective to describe something?
The house is beautiful but it is also expensive and spacious.
So you can say ‘The beautiful, old and wooden house’.
‘Beautiful’ is an adjective.
‘Old’ is an adjective.
‘Wooden’ is also an adjective.
When you have a group of adjectives to describe one thing, we call this ‘coordinating adjectives’ and we use commas or ‘and’ to separate them.
They need to be in an order though.
So we usually start with our opinion, so if we think the noun is ‘beautiful’ or ‘wonderful’ or ‘horrible’ we put that adjective first. Then the other adjectives we put size and age later on and after that material.
Participle adjectives
Words such as ‘exciting’ or ‘excited’, ‘boring’ or ‘bored’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘interested’ are called ‘participle adjectives’.
The present participle form of a verb in English ends in ‘….ing’.
The past participle form of a verb in English depends on the verb but for example for ‘forget’ the past simple form is ‘forgot’ and the past participle is ‘forgotten’.
If we say ‘The teacher was boring’, we are describing him as a person who is not exciting and is causing boredom. The word ‘boring’ here is an adjective because it describes him.
If we say ‘The teacher was bored’, we are describing his emotional state and that something has made him bored.
Adjective clauses.
A clause is a group of sentences which has a ‘subject’ that is a person or thing that does an action, and a verb, an action.
So for example if we say ‘The student talks a lot.’ The subject is the ‘student’ and the verb is ‘writes’.
If we say ‘The student was in the library’, this is a normal sentence.
If we want to describe him a bit more we can simply add a single word adjective ‘talkative’ and say:
‘The talkative student was in the library.’
However if we say:
‘The student, who talks a lot, was in the library’.
The meaning is exactly the same but instead of using a single word adjective, we use an adjective phrase ‘who talks a lot’.
Another example:
‘The helpful student came to the cafe’.
‘Helpful’ is an adjective.
But if we say:
‘The student, who helps people a lot, came to the cafe.
‘Who helps people’ is an adjective phrase.
However the two sentences have exactly the same meaning.
Compound adjectives
When we have two words come together to make a specific meaning to describe something, we call them ‘compound adjectives’.
We usually add a hyphen.
So we get the word ‘good’ and ‘looking’ and put them together to make ‘good-looking’ It’s two words but has one meaning.
It has the same meaning as single words such as ‘handsome’ or ‘pretty’.
The two words can be two adjectives such as ‘open’ and ‘minded’ which make ‘open-minded’.
‘Open-minded’ means someone who respects different people and different ways and ideas.
They can be a noun and an adjective like ‘mouth-watering’.
‘Mouth’ is a noun and ‘watering’ is an adjective. It means something that is very nice or delicious that you become excited about it.
Here are some more compound adjectives.
‘Breath-taking’: Something very beautiful or amazing that takes your breath away in awe or amazement.
‘Nail-biting’: Something that makes you ‘bite your nails’ i.e. it makes you very nervous.
‘World-famous: Someone or something that is known around the world, very famous around the world.
Compound adjectives can be used to express things in a shorter and simpler manner and journalists use them a lot. Well sometimes they have to, because their magazine or newspaper editor might give them a specific word limit.
Let us take this example.
‘Arnold Schwarzeneggger, who was born in Austria and who lives in the US is a very famous actor and was in many films.’
This is 23 words.
We can change this to:
‘Austrian-born, US-based and world-famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in many films.’
This is 11 words and ‘Austrian-born’, ‘US-based’ and ‘world-famous’ all count as one word each!
