What is an Adjective?

adjective (noun): a part-of-speech that modifies or describes a noun or a pronoun

An adjective is one of the nine parts of speech.

An adjective is a word that tells us more about a noun. It "describes" or "modifies" a noun (The big dog was hungry). In these examples, the adjective is in bold and the noun that it modifies is in italics.


An adjective often comes BEFORE a noun:

• - a green car
• - a dark sky
• - an interesting story

And sometimes an adjective comes AFTER a verb:

• - My car is green.
• - The sky became dark.
• - His story seemed interesting.

But adjectives can also modify pronouns (She is beautiful). Look at these examples:

• - They were empty.
• - I thought it seemed strange.
• - Those are not expensive.

Note that we can often use two or more adjectives together (a beautiful young French lady / it is black and white).

Adjective Form

Some adjectives have particular endings, for example:

• -able/-ible: washable, credible
• -ish/-like: childish, childlike.
• -ful/-less: careful, careless
• -ous: dangerous, harmonious
• -y: dirty, pretty

However, many adjectives have no obvious form.

Comparative And Superlative

Comparative

We use comparative adjectives to show change or make comparisons:

• - This car is certainly better, but it's much more expensive.
• - I'm feeling happier now.
• - I'm feeling happier now.

We use than when we want to compare one thing with another:

• - She is two years older than me.
• - New York is much bigger than Boston.
• - He is a better player than Ronaldo.
• - France is a bigger country than Britain.

We use than when we want to compare one thing with another:When we want to describe how something or someone changes we can use two comparatives with and:

• - The balloon got bigger and bigger.
• - Everything is getting more and more expensive.
• - Grandfather is looking older and older.

We often use the with comparative adjectives to show that one thing depends on another:

• The faster you drive, the more dangerous it is.
  (= When you drive faster, it is more dangerous.)


• The higher they climbed, the colder it got.
  (= When they climbed higher, it got colder.)

Superlative

We often use the with comparative adjectives to show that one thing depends on another:We use the with superlative adjectives:

• - It was the happiest day of my life.
• - Everest is the highest mountain in the world.
• - That’s the best film I have seen this year.
• - Everest is the highest mountain in the world.I have three sisters: Jan is the oldest and Angela is the youngest.

How to form comparative and superlative adjectives

We usually add –er and –est to one-syllable words to make comparatives and superlatives:

If an adjective ends in –e, we add –r or –st:

If an adjective ends in a vowel and a consonant, we double the consonant:

If an adjective ends in a consonant and –y, we change –y to –i and add –er or –est:

We use more and most to make comparatives and superlatives for most two syllable adjectives and for all adjectives with three or more syllables:

The adjectives good, bad and far have irregular comparatives and superlatives: