Good words to describe a grandfather depend on what you want to say about him. For his character, try patient, gentle, wise, generous and steady. For his humour, try playful, mischievous and dry. For the way he looks, try silver-haired, weathered and sprightly. And for what he means to you, try beloved, dependable and irreplaceable….

Good words to describe the New Year depend on which part of it you mean. For the night itself, try festive, sparkling, noisy and joyful. For the fresh start, try fresh, hopeful, promising and clean. For the year that has just ended, try eventful, memorable, challenging or quiet. For wishes in a card, the classic…

Good adjectives for Thanksgiving depend on what you are describing. For the meal, try golden, savory, buttery, hearty and homemade. For the gathering, try festive, crowded, lively and warm. For the feeling behind the holiday, the words are thankful, grateful, blessed and content. Below, the words are grouped by subject, and every word comes with…

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…