Most lists of adjective examples give you a hundred words with nothing to hang them on. This one gives 196 adjectives arranged by what they actually describe — size, colour, sound, mood, quality — because that is how you look for a word when you are stuck mid-sentence. Each has a short meaning. After the…

N is a small letter that punches above its weight in criticism: negligent, notorious, noxious, nitpicking. It also holds some of the most precise words in English for things that are only half there — nebulous, nascent, notional. This page lists 100 adjectives that start with N, each with its meaning and a short example,…

E is the most common letter in English, and its adjectives are unusually good at carrying feeling — elated, exasperated, exhausted, envious. This page gathers 122 adjectives that start with E, arranged by the job you need doing rather than by whether the word is a compliment, because most of them can be either depending…

The letter A carries more useful adjectives than almost any other, and that is a problem as much as a gift: when every second describing word you reach for begins with the same sound, your writing starts to hum. This page lists 171 adjectives that start with A, grouped by the job each one actually…

Fixing commas in a paragraph you later delete is wasted work. Edit from the largest unit down to the smallest, and never in the other direction.

Most professional writing is pitched several years above its audience, and the writers doing it believe simplicity would make them look less capable.

Four patterns, and the third one lets English talk about things that did not happen — which is a stranger ability than it sounds.

English has four ways to talk about the past, and the difference between them is not when something happened but how it connects to now.