We Live in a Universe of Order: Adjectives

Fluent English speakers obey many rules of the language without thinking about them, maybe without ever knowing about them. These things seem so natural to a native speaker, but as a student of English, these rules must be learned in order to speak fluently.

One very important, commonly overlooked (and fun to learn) rule is the rule of adjective order. The rule of adjective order is the reason why My Fat Greek Big Wedding doesn't sound right. It's why we say 'I bought a pair of new black leather shoes' instead of 'I bought a pair of leather new black shoes'.

The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. See the table below. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one can almost never be broken - and yet many people have no idea it even exists.

Examples:

It was a strange (1) blue (6) liquid (8) substance that he had never seen before.

The car was a large (2), red (6) BMW.

The long (2), pointless (10) meeting seemed to go on forever.

My Big (2) Fat (3) Greek (7) Wedding was a huge success.

Now you:

Put the adjectives in the correct order.*

The brown big guard fat dog jumped over the red small fox.

One small exception...

There is one a rare exception to the adjectival hierarchy: the Big Bad Wolf. Bad is opinion, and should therefore come first. However, this phrase is too busy obeying another rule no one has heard of: the rule of ablaut reduplication.

Other examples of the rule in action include chit-chat, singsong, flipflop and hip-hop. When you shift vowel sounds for effect this way, the vowels always follow a specific order: I, then A, then O. You’d think it was more complicated, that it depended on mood or context, but no, it’s that simple – bish bash bosh.

*The big fat brown guard dog jumped over the small red fox.