2.2 Paco's was wearing a beautiful grey mac

As we know, the English language is far more fixed when dealing with word order than other languages. That being so, when adjectives are used in attributive position, that is, in front of the nouns they modify, they normally follow a concrete order. Have a look at the chart below to learn what order the most frequently-used adjectives in English follow according to type. If you can't see it properly, click on it and get the file.

e.g.: Paco bought a beautiful (opinion) brown (color) mac

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If you want to study it by means of a presentation, you can download a good one here. And to practice it, there are plenty of exercises on the web, we have chosen these three ones: Exercise 1, Exercise 2.

If you click here, you will be able to get an mp3 file and its tapescript which includes a brief explanation of the correct order of adjectives in English.


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Write the adjectives between brackets in the correct order. If you doubt, watch the video on the right.

1. Tsunamis are natural hazards.

(terrible, huge)

2. In the bar, he listened to a song.

(American, rhythmic, romantic)

3. Paco bought a tennis racket two months ago.

(French, nice, blue, graphite)

4. He met an barman.

(African, tall, middle-aged, interesting)

5. Paco slept on a mattress.

(new, wool, huge, comfortable)

 

  

Icono IDevice Curiosity
By Anonymous. Public domain
It is true that it is not frequent to use more than three adjectives together to modify a noun. However, on some occasions we may find them, even in natural speech. Read the following amusing short conversation (bold type is ours) between the ancient Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and Joseph Chamberlain in which the latter answers using several adjectives to modify the noun word.
Churchill was more than capable of obfuscating speech. Once, in a parliamentary debate with Joseph Chamberlain, he admitted that he might have been guilty of a "terminological inexactitude".
Replied Chamberlain, "I prefer the ugly little English three-letter word: l-i-e."1
1 Taken from Robert Hendrickson, The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes (Ware, Hertforshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997), p. 55.

That's more than enough about adjectives for now! We will complete the topic by working a little bit on vowel sounds. Concretely, we will study the difference between /ɪ/ and  /i:/, but this will be in next section!
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