How to Correctly Order Adjectives

The Correct Order of Adjectives

You wouldn’t describe your new outerwear purchase as “my leather Italian new green coat.” It just doesn’t sound right, even though all those adjectives are true. It is a new jacket that’s made of leather, it’s green, it’s from Italy. Instead, you’d say, “my new green Italian leather coat.” The order in which you use adjectives makes a difference in flow and understanding.

There is a simple rule to understand the correct order of adjectives: Words that describe opinions must always be placed before words that are fact based.

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For example, if you’re looking at a new house and you think the kitchen is “tiny” and that the paint job is “ugly,” those are valid opinions—but not facts. Someone else may feel differently and love the “well-organized” kitchen and “beautiful” colors throughout the house. These opinion-based adjectives would precede adjectives that are undisputable, like the material the house was made of (“brick”) or the age of the building (“brand new”):

The tiny but well-organized kitchen was brand new; there’s disagreement about whether the paint color choices throughout are ugly or beautiful additions to the brick walls.

Putting Adjectives in the Correct Order

You may intuitively grasp that multiple adjectives must go in a specific order, but it’s not always so obvious. To help with this sometimes-confusing concept is Royal Order of Adjectives, which decrees that descriptive words must be ordered as such:

• Opinion
• Size
• Age
• Shape
• Color
• Origin
• Material
• Purpose

Consider memorizing the acronym OSASCOMP.

Before the opinion-based adjectives have their turn, writers must first address determiners and quantities.

Determiners

These words must always precede adjectives and the nouns the modify. Examples of these include “the,” “our,” and “these.”

Quantity

If you’ve got a string of adjectives, adding a quantity in the middle won’t sound right. Put it at the beginning of your adjective list, but after the determiner. A quantity-based adjective could be a number or a word like “some” or “many.”

Opinion

Words like “delicious” and “perfect” are matters of opinion. But if you’ve got two opinion-based adjectives in a row, you should order them from general and broad to personally specific.

Size

This could refer to height, mass, or weight. A house could be “huge” or “tall and skinny.”

Age

Words that describe the age of something can be straightforward, like “old” and “young,” or a little more abstract, like “ancient,” “vintage,” or “wizened.”

Shape

An interesting shape makes for an interesting description. Consider a “heart-shaped” bathtub or a unique “octagonal” house. Sometimes you just might need to differentiate between the “square” box and the “rectangular” one.

Color

If something is more than an average shade of “blue,” don’t be afraid of more specific words like “teal” or “navy.” The more descriptive you are, the better for your readers.

Origin

If you’re trying a new cuisine from Southeast Asia, specify whether it’s “Thai” food or “Vietnamese.” You might prefer “British” humor, “American” films, and vintage “Italian” suits.

Material

A “cotton” sweater feels much different than a “wool” sweater.

Purpose or Qualifier

Sometimes a purpose or qualifier doesn’t fit neatly into one of the other adjective categories. This is especially true for a “washing” machine, a “vampire” bat, a “grandfather” clock, and “running” water. These adjectives help to differentiate the nouns they’re describing and come last in a list of descriptive terms.

Examples of Correct Adjective Order

It’s important to note that when describing something, whether it’s aloud or in writing, you are not obligated to use a list of adjectives. The acronym OSASCOMP is merely a tool to help you remember the correct order of adjectives.

In the sentence “My grandmother has an old wooden chest”—the adjective “old” comes before “wooden” because in the correct order of adjectives, age precedes material.

If you covet your neighbor’s classic car, a stunning baby-blue convertible Corvette, you might note that the adjectives in that sentence are ordered as such: opinion, color, qualifier.

Try a few different adjective combinations aloud and in writing, you’ll find that you almost always order them according to OSASCOMP. With helpful writing templates from Microsoft 365, you can focus on the content, rather than the layout of your next great written work.