This adjectives worksheet has seven exercises that build from easy to hard: finding adjectives, using them after verbs, comparatives and superlatives, adjective order, adjective or adverb, commas between adjectives, and choosing a stronger word. Every exercise has an answer key with a one-line reason, so students can check their own work and teachers can use…

Funny adjectives are describing words that make people smile just by their sound: discombobulated (confused), persnickety (fussy), higgledy-piggledy (messy), ginormous (huge), wishy-washy (weak or undecided) and flabbergasted (astonished) are favourites. Most of them have plain equivalents, so the trick is knowing when a playful word adds personality and when it just sounds silly. This page…

Indefinite adjectives describe a noun in a general, non-specific way: they tell you roughly how many or how much, or which ones without naming them. Common examples are some, any, many, much, few, little, several, all, both, each, every, either, neither, other, another, enough and no – as in “Several students left early” or “Is…

To turn a noun into an adjective, English usually adds a suffix: danger → dangerous, hope → hopeful, nation → national, child → childish, rain → rainy. The common adjective suffixes are -ful, -less, -ous, -al, -ic, -ive, -able/-ible, -y, -ish, -ly, -ent/-ant and -ary. Each one adds a meaning of its own, and the…

The most useful words to describe music name one thing you can actually hear: its speed (slow, upbeat, frantic), its mood (joyful, haunting, melancholy), its texture (lush, sparse, layered), its volume and energy (soft, driving, explosive) or its sound quality (warm, bright, gritty). “Good” and “nice” tell a reader nothing; “a sparse, haunting piano piece…

Opposite adjectives are pairs of adjectives with contrary meanings, such as hot and cold, happy and sad, polite and impolite. Grammarians call them antonyms. Below are 76 common pairs, grouped by topic. After the list are the two things that make opposites useful rather than just memorised: the prefixes English uses to build them, and…

A descriptive adjective is an adjective that names a quality of a noun: what something is like. In a tall tree, bitter coffee and The room was cold, the words tall, bitter and cold are descriptive adjectives. They answer the question “what kind?”, and they are by far the largest group of adjectives in English….

Sensory words are words that describe how something looks, sounds, smells, tastes or feels: glossy, crackling, musty, tangy, prickly. Most of them are adjectives, though verbs (sizzle, glint) and nouns (whiff, hum) can do the same job. They let a reader experience a scene instead of being told about it, which is why teachers ask…

Mood words describe the feeling a piece of writing, a scene or a place creates in the reader: eerie, peaceful, tense, melancholy, joyful. When a teacher asks “what is the mood of this passage?”, the answer is one of these words, backed up by the details in the text that produce it. Below are 108…

Descriptive language is writing that uses sensory detail, precise words and comparisons so the reader can picture a person, place or moment instead of just being told about it. “The kitchen was messy” tells. “Three days of plates leaned in the sink, and the floor stuck to my socks” describes. The second sentence never uses…