Putting Adjectives in the Right Order

Are you game for some mind-reading? We can predict what you’ll do with the following task:

Describe two houses. For the first house, use these adjectives: green, old, and big. For the second house use brick, square, and unusual.

We’re pretty sure you came up with “big, old, green house” and “unusual, square, brick house.” That’s because there’s a pattern native English speakers follow when they use multiple adjectives to describe a thing. We’re steeped in the pattern from birth, and apply it effortlessly. Which is a good thing, because it’s comically complicated.

Here’s how Mark Forsyth lays it out in The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase: "[adjectives] absolutely have to be in this order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, and then the noun."

The Royal Order of Adjectives, credited to Professor Charles Darling, is essentially the same: observation or opinion, size and shape, age, color, origin, material, and qualifier (a word closely linked to the noun, like the school in “school bus”), and then the noun.

Forsyth’s assertion that the order is inviolable is bold, and you’ll have to forgive us if it raises our dictionary hackles: we know the language rather well, and in our experience, consistency is not among its charms.

And so it is that we now turn to exceptions to the rule, which do in fact exist. Take, for example, the classic lyric “what a long, strange trip it’s been” from the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” song. Long is an adjective of size, and strange is an adjective of opinion or observation; according to both the Forsyth and Royal Order, we should all always say “strange, long trip.” We don’t, and we haven’t since well before the song was written—“long strange” has dominated in writing since the 19th century. Similarly, in Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” it’s “walking down that long lonesome road,” with size again coming before opinion.

Sometimes a violation of the order is about emphasis and clarity. Observe the following scenario: you want to borrow one of your friend’s many felt hats, in particular one of two lovely old felt hats that differ only in color. You will distinguish between the hats with the pertinent adjective coming first: the green old felt hat, rather than the yellow one.

It’s true, though, that the order as described above is the norm. It’s also true that one can get a bit tangled in its details when trying consciously to apply it. Do not fear: there is an easier way to think about it. Professor Keith Folse asserts that all we really have to do is put the adjective that is most like a noun closest to the noun itself. So if we want to describe the word hat with the words old, felt, green, and lovely, we can consider felt to be most nounlike—felt being in fact a noun that refers to a particular kind of cloth or material. Green is often an adjective, but it is also commonly a noun (as in “green is a lovely color”), and so it comes next. Old and lovely both can be either a noun or an adjective (“days of old,” “my lovelies”), but old is more commonly a noun than lovely is, which means we get “lovely old green felt hat.” Which happens to be the same thing we’d get by following either the Forsyth or Royal orders.

Phew.