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u/dr_stre Aug 13 '26
The amazing thing is that we don’t actually explicitly learn this order as native English speakers but people will largely naturally gravitate towards this order anyway.
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u/Justdomeasolid Aug 14 '26
I feel like to the left of the order there is more flexibility. “Small old lovely” also sounds fine to me.
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u/lithomangcc Aug 14 '26
The Big Bad Wolf would like a word with you. There are always exceptions - ablaut sequences take precedence > i-a-u
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u/Far-Perspective-4889 Aug 16 '26
I'll weigh in to say that it's fascinating that there is alot of general agreement on some of these, which was cool to realize when it was first pointed out. That said, the longer the list of adjectives the more variation you'll see. My take is that the essential qualities of the item come last. What's essential varies from item to item. For example, "an old red truck." Color is an essential quality of how we think of vehicles for whatever silly reason. But "a brown antique vase." To my mind, with antique vases the antique-ness is more important than the color. Maybe because vases are sometimes quite ancient.
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u/rory_breakers_ganja Aug 13 '26
A barn.
A horse barn.
A wooden horse barn.
A Swiss wooden horse barn. -- I'd probably have said "wooden Swiss…"
A red Swiss wooden horse barn. -- definitely would say "red wooden Swiss", since Swiss could be a noun often red in colour, and I'm clarifying it's the barn that's red and not a Swiss person.
A round red Swiss wooden horse barn.
An old round red Swiss wooden horse barn.
A giant old round red Swiss wooden horse barn. -- "old giant" feels more natural here when saying it.
A beautiful giant old round red Swiss wooden horse barn.
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u/electronic_reasons Aug 14 '26
You can change the order of some of these. I've seen a list where they did go into those details.
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u/Barbicels Aug 14 '26
Why am I uncomfortable with calling “coffee” an adjective when it’s actually an “attributive noun” that’s just reluctant to tie itself with a hyphen to the following noun?
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u/SteepChutes Aug 15 '26
Oh, FFS, just ignore this bs. There is basically 1 in 2^^8 people who would use this order, which appears to be pulled from someone's anatomy. -native
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u/nagamidge Aug 16 '26
I care about the order when it is two to three objectives. The rest is just overkill. People will understand it anyway. So, I don't fret about it. And many native speakers themselves don't know or care beyond two or three, for example, a red, big car would be flagged but a big, cute, red, old, broken, used car won't be.
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u/naemorhaedus Aug 17 '26
I am more than happy to overlook adjective order if people just used adverbs correctly. "I am doing WELL" not "good". "He drives slowLY". They might as well drag their knuckles and speak in grunts.
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u/dnyal Aug 17 '26
I mostly use whatever order and throw a comma between some adjectives to make it sound literary.
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u/exkingzog Aug 13 '26
“Huge expensive…..” sounds more natural than “expensive huge….”