Author
Nathan Cole writes the adjective guides and word lists on Grammar Simplified. Every guide he publishes is checked against Merriam-Webster for spelling and usage, the Chicago Manual of Style for punctuation, and the AP Stylebook where a convention is specific to web writing. Where a rule is genuinely disputed among those authorities, he says so in the guide rather than picking a side quietly. Corrections are welcome and get acted on — see the editorial policy.
919 guides published
An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun by adding information about it – which one, what kind, how many, or whose. In a cracked screen, cracked is the adjective and screen is the noun it modifies. That definition is the one most people are taught, and it is not quite enough….
A widely cited 2018 eye-tracking study by the job board Ladders put the first pass over a CV at about seven seconds. Treat the number as an illustration rather than a finding — it comes from a company with something to sell and thirty recruiters watched — but the direction is right, and adjectives are…
D is the letter of disapproval. 37 of the 152 adjectives below begin with dis-, and most of those are complaints — dismissive, disingenuous, disreputable, disgraceful. What is easy to miss is that the same prefix makes several of the letter’s best compliments too: discerning, discreet, discriminating, distinguished. This page lists 152 adjectives that start…
Integrity is hard to describe because most of the words for it describe only part of it. Honest covers what a person says. Consistent covers whether they say it on a bad day too. Neither covers the part that costs something. This page gives 60 adjectives for integrity, sorted into the three things the idea…
Y is a small letter, and a page that pretends otherwise is padding. English has a few dozen adjectives beginning with Y, and 12 of them cluster around just three ideas: age, the colour yellow, and noises made by animals and by people behaving like them. This page lists 28 adjectives that start with Y…
L is unusually rich in words for pace — languid, lethargic, leisurely, lively, listless — and for several of them the only difference is whether the slowness is a pleasure or a complaint. This page lists 134 adjectives that start with L, grouped by the job each does. Every word has a plain meaning beside…
Close to three fifths of the adjectives in this letter are negations — in-, im- and ir- attached to a word that already existed. That makes I unusually easy to use and unusually easy to use lazily: not accurate and inaccurate are not quite the same sentence, and the second only earns its place when…
Most words used about students are used badly. Bright praises a fixed quality the student did nothing to earn; hard-working — which is not in the list below, and is left out on purpose — praises effort so vaguely that it can mean anything. This page gives 88 adjectives for students, sorted by what they…
R is the letter of temperament under pressure. It holds an unusual number of words for how somebody behaves when things are difficult — resilient, resolute, reckless, resigned, relentless, remorseless — and it carries praise and criticism in roughly equal measure. This page lists 143 adjectives that start with R, sorted by the job you…
Writing about motherhood fails in one of two directions. Either every sentence reaches for selfless and unconditional until the words stop registering, or it goes so far the other way that the difficulty is all that is left. This page gives 80 words to describe motherhood, sorted into the five things people are usually trying…
Grammar Simplified
Plain-English grammar guides and curated adjective lists. Free to read, checked against Merriam-Webster, Chicago and AP before publication.
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