Personal Blogs

Do you like my grammar hardback red new fat big lovely book?



Most native speakers of English will instinctively agree the order of the adjectives in my sentence above is wrong—weird even—without necessarily being able to describe exactly why; it flouts some rules that we all know but are not normally conscious of. These rules are difficult to write down precisely but roughly speaking follow a sort of semantic spectrum. The Cambridge Dictionary gives this order

opinion - size - physical nature - shape - age - colour - origin - material - type - purpose

If we rewrite my initial sentence using this order we get


which sounds perfectly normal, albeit a bit wordy perhaps.

Mu new dictionary—the one pictured—calls the rules "Adjectival order", although "Royal Order of Adjectives" is a more colourful name.