What are superlative adjectives?
- What are adjectives?
First, let’s start with understanding what ‘adjectives’ are. 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
2. So what are superlative adjectives?
So we know what adjectives are now. They are words used to describe nouns (names of things), but what exactly is a superlative adjective.
Well when we want to compare two things we use comparative adjectives.
If we say “John is tall”, John is a noun and ‘tall’ is the adjective.
But if we want to compare we can say “Peter is taller than John.”
The word “taller” is a comparative adjective. It is an adjective but used to compare something to something else, in this case Peter to John.
There are three types of comparative adjectives.
- Short
If an adjective is short e.g. ‘rich’ or ‘clean’, its comparative form is made by adding ‘er’, so ‘rich’ becomes ‘richer’ and ‘clean’ becomes ‘cleaner’.
Here are more examples:
2. Long adjectives.
For long adjectives we need to add ‘more‘ so beautiful becomes ‘more beautiful’.
Example: ‘Peter thinks Rome is more beautiful than Milan.’
Long adjectives are usually three syllables or longer.
Here are some more examples:
3. Irregular adjectives.
The third type of comparative adjectives are the irregular ones which are mainly.
Good, which becomes ‘better’.
Bad, which becomes ‘worse’.
Far, which becomes ‘further’ or ‘farther’.
Superlative adjectives.
So comparative adjectives are used to compare to say that something is ‘taller’, richer’, ‘more beautiful’ or ‘more expensive’ than something.
So for example we can say “Canada is bigger than America.”
But what if we want to talk about something to the highest degree, or the utmost, or something which is the top of a list we use a ‘superlative adjective’.
For example, “Canada is bigger than America but Russia is the biggest country in the world.”
There is no country bigger than Russia. It is the biggest country in the world.
We form superlative adjectives like this:
- short adjectives
We add “the….est”, so rich becomes ‘the richest”
‘Clean’ becomes ‘the cleanest‘.
‘Tall’ becomes ‘the tallest‘.
2. long adjectives.
We add “the most’, so ‘beautiful’ becomes ‘the most beautiful’
‘Expensive’ becomes ‘the most expensive’.
‘Intelligent’ becomes ‘the most intelligent’.
3. Irregular adjectives.
Good becomes ‘the best’
Bad becomes ‘the worst’
Far becomes ‘ the furthest’ or ‘the farthest’
So here are some more examples of sentences with superlatives.
If you have any questions ask in the comments section below.