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
The striking thing about this vocabulary is how much of it is built out of negatives. 15 of the 62 words below say what a god is not, or cannot be: not knowable, not changeable, not created, not subject to death, not able to be got to the bottom of. That is not English running…
F has an unusual number of ways to call someone silly. 7 of the 142 adjectives below describe a person who has got it wrong — fanciful, fatuous, flighty, flippant, foolhardy, foolish and frivolous — and each names a different fault. That is worth having: most of the time a writer reaches for silly and…
Most word lists for this subject describe the teacher. The search is usually for words to describe the teaching, and this page leads with those: 14 words for the lesson, then 15 for the person giving it, then three sections for how it lands, how the room is held, and what the job is like…
K is one of the smallest letters in English, and a striking share of what it has sits in one cluster: 17 of the 40 adjectives below begin kn-, a spelling that preserves a k dropped from standard English pronunciation during the seventeenth century — though the cluster survives in some Scots dialects, and was…
J is a small letter with two unexpected concentrations. Eight of the words below mean some form of cheerful — jolly, jovial, jocular, jocose, jocund, jubilant, joyful, joyous — and another 8 come from the Latin words for law and judgement. That is sixteen of the letter from two ideas; the rest scatter, and the…
C is a big letter, and a good deal of the reason is two Latin prefixes doing heavy work. 29 of the words below begin con- and 17 begin com-, most of them from the Latin for with or together — but not all of them. Conical comes from cone; contrary and controlling both come…
The vocabulary of fatherhood is older than people assume, and not in the places you would guess. Tender and playful are thirteenth-century words; nurture is fourteenth and affectionate fifteenth. The provision words that sound ancestral are the recent arrivals — reliable is first recorded in 1569 and dependable not until 1735. English had ways to…
B is the letter of blunt force. Its insults are short and loud — brash, bossy, boorish, brutal — and they land harder than their length suggests. Its compliments are longer and quieter, and a run of the warmest are built on the same Latin bene-, meaning well: benevolent, beneficial, benign. This page lists 132…
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…
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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