On the Order of Adjectives in English

25 Sep, 2026

I don't want to only write about AI, so here is a bit of low impact fun.

You may have seen this before:

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion - size - age - shape - colour - origin - material - purpose Noun.

So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac.

It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist.

I've seen this a couple of times now and both times I looked up why this is the order my searches turned up nothing that felt definitive or conclusive.¹

So, in my hubris, I am going to publish my opinion... or rather my hypothesis without any further research.

My Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that the adjectives are in order of innateness as humans perceive objects.

The closer the adjective is to the noun, the more fundamental that property is to the noun and therefore more of an impact changing it would have on the item.

Purpose

If you change the knife in the example from a whittling knife to a steak knife, that fundamentally alters what it is. Being a whittling knife is the most innate property that it can have, with the sole exception of being a knife. So the purpose goes closest to the noun.

Material

The material is the second most innate property an object can have. It is literally what it is made of. You can make a knife from a lot of things. Different alloys of steel, iron, bronze, copper, brass, or many other materials. The change you make to the material the the one thing less

Origin

Origin is the next most innate property because how a thing is made often differs from country to country. For example, a Belgian waffle is distinctly different to an American waffle. Different hole sizes, for example. So, we have once again moved down the order of innateness.

And so on... right?

Now, I would happily leave my argument here and gesture at the rest of the adjectives and assert they simply hold true to the pattern.

However.

There is one adjective that I think might trip people up as to its order.

Shape.

Isn't shape more fundamental than colour? Doesn't the shape of an item make it more of what it is than the colour?

Not necessarily. Take, for example, quartz. Quartz is a mineral that takes many shapes and colours. However it is the impurities within the crystal structure that gives it its colour.

You can learn a lot about something in the natural world from its colour.

Therefore if you can change the shape of something without altering what it is, then the shape is less fundamental to more objects than the colour is.

Thank you for your attention.

No, I shall not be taking questions.²

#english #linguistics