Meaning of the Adjective and its Order of Placement

What is the Meaning of Adjective

The meaning of adjective is characteristic of a noun. Characters are good as well as bad, like a someone has good quality and others have bad quality.

In English grammar we use adjective characterize the noun or pronoun. Therefore, adjectives are the words which modify nouns or pronouns. Such as, Pink, happy, and bad etc. are adjectives because they can explain things more clearly For Instance, An old lady, a beautiful girl etc.

Formation of Adjective in English Grammar

Adjectives have many types of forms. Some are common adjectives are formed when we add a suffix to a noun or verb. For instance, when we add the suffix -ful to the noun success, makes the adjective successful, and adding the suffix -able to the verb read makes the adjective eatable.

Other suffixes often used to form adjectives which contains:

• -ary
• -al
• -able
• ible
• -ic
• –ish
• -less
• -ical
• -like
• -some
• -ous
• -y

Some adjectives form by participles such as verbs ending in -ed or -ing, but some others are adjectives originally themselves adjectives, such as, fast, near, light etc  and the cannot formed from nouns or verbs. 

Meaning in term of Placement of  the Adjective

In Relation to Noun

Normally adjective placed before the noun it modifies if special importance on the adjective is not needed. In a pair of words, the second is generally apparent to have greater emphasis. So, in the examples below, the noun has the most emphasis, for example:

Young girls
Red flowers

And in these, the adjective is emphasized:

songs half-heard
words unspoken

Order of the Adjective

As we know that most of the adjectives are placed before the noun that they are modifying.

Following are Series wise general rules for deciding in which order number to place multiple adjectives.

1. Number or quantity – such as few, an or three
2. Size – such as huge or little
3. Shape – such as quadrangular or rectangle
4. Age – such as young or aged
5. Color – such as green, purple or orange
6. Origin – such as Urdu or Chinese
7. Material – such as Iron or plastic
8. Qualifier – the qualifier is an adjective that denotes the item’s type or purpose, some examples are evening bag and cooking pot.