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.
964 guides published
This is the companion to a page about describing a woman, and it is built the same way on purpose, because the two are most useful read together. The interesting fact about describing a man is not that there are many words for it. It is that some of them attach to men and not…
U is the letter where one prefix does most of the work. 109 of the 151 adjectives below begin un-, and that is the difficulty with this letter rather than a fact about it: English will let you put un- in front of almost anything, and the result is a real adjective that a dictionary…
Most lists on this subject are lists of compliments, sorted by how flattering they are. This one is sorted by what the words actually do, because the useful fact about describing a woman is not that there are many words for it — it is that some of them behave differently than they would about…
V is a small letter carrying a large amount of Latin. Of the 216 adjectives below, 67 begin vi- and 64 begin ve-, and a great many of them arrived whole from Latin roots that are still visible: vid- and vis- for seeing, voc- for calling, viv- for living, ver- for truth. That is why…
Most lists on this subject are lists of compliments. This one is not, and it says which is which: of the 106 words to describe a hard-working person below, 8 are not compliments at all and 17 depend entirely on the sentence. Plodding, obsessive and overzealous all describe someone who works hard, and none of…
G is two letters wearing one hat. 31 of the 230 adjectives below begin gl- and 69 begin gr-, and between them they hold most of what the letter is good at: light and smoothness on the gl- side — gleaming, glossy, glassy — and roughness, weight and complaint on the gr- side, in gritty,…
W runs to compounds. 33 of the 192 adjectives below are hyphenated, and 18 of those begin well- — one of the larger such clusters in English, though not the largest: self- beats it comfortably. The construction is mostly used to praise something specific — well-read, well-founded, well-mannered each name a different kind of good…
P leans harder on Latin than almost any other letter. 82 of the 278 adjectives below begin pre-, pro- or per- — not all of them from the Latin prefixes meaning before, forward and through, since pretty is Germanic and protean is Greek, but most. That is why the letter holds so many near-neighbours a…
Almost every company describes its culture in the same handful of words, and none of them survives contact with someone who has left. This page gives 90 words to describe company culture that are specific enough to be disagreed with, which is a good test to apply to any of them: a word the reader…
H runs to compounds. 18 of the 140 adjectives below are hyphenated, and 8 of those are built on a body part or the mind — hard-headed, heavy-handed, high-minded, hot-headed, half-hearted, hard-nosed. English reaches for that construction when it wants to name a trait of character in one word, and this letter carries a good…
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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