How adjectives actually behave in a sentence — the order they fall into, how they compare, when they carry opinion rather than fact, and how to reach for a vivid word without overreaching. Guides for writing more precisely, rather than lists of words for one subject.
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How adjectives actually behave in a sentence — the order they fall into, how they compare, when they carry opinion rather than fact, and how to reach for a vivid word without overreaching. Guides for writing more precisely, rather than lists of words for one subject.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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