In psychology and medicine, affect (stressed on the first syllable: AF-fect) is a person’s visible emotional expression: what you can see in their face, voice, gestures and posture. The words used to describe it fall into four groups: range (full, restricted, blunted, flat), stability (stable or labile), fit (congruent or incongruent with mood, appropriate or…

Limiting adjectives are words that come before a noun and narrow down which thing or how many you mean, without describing what it is like. In “these two red apples”, these and two are limiting adjectives (they pick out which apples and how many), while red is a descriptive adjective. The main limiting adjectives are…

A good adjectives anchor chart does one job: it reminds students that an adjective is a word that describes a noun, and it gives them words to reach for while they write. The simplest version has a one-line definition at the top (“An adjective describes a noun”), the three questions adjectives answer (What kind? How…

An adjective followed by a to-infinitive is one of the most common patterns in English: happy to help, easy to use, ready to go, too tired to think. The adjective describes a person or thing, and the infinitive says what the feeling, quality or difficulty is about. The pattern looks like one structure, but it…

Most words ending in -ly are adverbs (quickly, slowly), but a few dozen common ones are adjectives: friendly, lovely, lonely, lively, ugly, silly, costly, deadly, elderly, likely, timely, holy, early and daily, among others. You can tell them apart by what they describe: a friendly dog describes a noun, so friendly is an adjective. Below…

A postpositive adjective is an adjective placed straight after the noun or pronoun it describes, instead of before it: attorney general, something special, the best seats available. In English the normal position is before the noun (a special day), so postpositive adjectives are the exception, and they only appear in a handful of patterns. Knowing…

Extreme adjectives (also called strong adjectives) already contain the idea of “very”: freezing means very cold, enormous means very big, exhausted means very tired and delicious means very tasty. Because the “very” is built in, we normally don’t put very in front of them. We say absolutely freezing or really exhausted, not very freezing. Below…

This adjectives worksheet has seven exercises that build from easy to hard: finding adjectives, using them after verbs, comparatives and superlatives, adjective order, adjective or adverb, commas between adjectives, and choosing a stronger word. Every exercise has an answer key with a one-line reason, so students can check their own work and teachers can use…

Funny adjectives are describing words that make people smile just by their sound: discombobulated (confused), persnickety (fussy), higgledy-piggledy (messy), ginormous (huge), wishy-washy (weak or undecided) and flabbergasted (astonished) are favourites. Most of them have plain equivalents, so the trick is knowing when a playful word adds personality and when it just sounds silly. This page…

Indefinite adjectives describe a noun in a general, non-specific way: they tell you roughly how many or how much, or which ones without naming them. Common examples are some, any, many, much, few, little, several, all, both, each, every, either, neither, other, another, enough and no – as in “Several students left early” or “Is…