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.
A predicate adjective follows a linking verb and describes the subject of the sentence, not the verb. In the soup is cold, cold is a predicate adjective: it reaches back across is to describe the soup. The contrast is with the attributive position, where the adjective sits directly in front of its noun – the…
An adjective phrase is a group of words built around a head adjective, working together as a single adjective. In she was remarkably patient with the children, the whole underlined stretch is one adjective phrase, and patient is its head. The phrase is doing exactly what a lone adjective does – describing a noun or…
A possessive adjective tells you who something belongs to, and it always sits in front of a noun. English has seven: my, your, his, her, its, our, their. Person Singular Plural First my our Second your your Third his, her, its their They never change for the thing owned. My car, my cars, my enormous…
Finding adjectives is easy until the sentence stops cooperating. The tired dog slept gives its adjective up immediately. The dog looked tired after the running water woke it has three candidates and only two adjectives. Three tests will settle almost any case. Use them in order. Test 1: the very test Put very in front…
An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun by adding information about it – which one, what kind, how many, or whose. In a cracked screen, cracked is the adjective and screen is the noun it modifies. That definition is the one most people are taught, and it is not quite enough….
Most lists of emotion words are alphabetical, which is the least useful order there is. Nobody sits down knowing they want a word beginning with D. They know roughly what the feeling is and need the right strength of it — the difference between annoyed and exasperated and livid, which is not a difference of…
Q is a letter with a hole in the middle of it. There is a small everyday vocabulary — quick, quiet, quaint, quirky, queasy — and then almost everything else is Latin arithmetic: quadr- for four, quin- for five, quart- for a fourth part. Close to a third of this page is counting. This page…
Z is the last letter and one of the emptiest, and what it does hold splits cleanly in two. There is a small run of everyday words about energy and speed — zany, zesty, zippy, zingy — and then a long tail of Greek and Latin technical vocabulary built on zoo- for animal, zym- for…
X is the smallest letter in English, and almost everything in it arrived from Greek. Four roots carry nearly the whole letter: xero- for dry, xylo- for wood, xantho- for yellow and xeno- for foreign or strange. Learn those four and most of this page decodes itself. This page lists 26 adjectives that start with…
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…
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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