Adjective Order

Adjective order has become a meme recently, and I finally found a good enough example to share the idea with you. Native speakers of English tend to put multiple adjectives in a certain order without realizing that they’re following a pattern. Here’s the rule: When you apply more than one adjective to a noun, they should go in order according to these categories. I’ve seen several versions of this; this one is based on a couple lists I happened to google a few minutes ago:

Article, Quantity, Value/opinion, Size, Physical Quality, Temperature, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Type, Purpose

Most of them (that I’ve seen) don’t include quantity (I added it myself to the list I have on my wall) and none I’ve seen include the article (a, an, the) as the first item. This order is not ironclad, especially if you want to emphasize one of the adjectives.

Now for a test. Brooke McEldowney is one of the most erudite comic strip writer-artists that I know of, and though I generally avoid politics on this site, this Pibgorn comic is too good an example of multiple adjectives to pass up. The nouns I’m interested in are buss, war, gears, osculations, and interlocutor.

The test is to look at the adjectives that precede these nouns and determine whether he follows the order in the list or not. Have fun!