English Grammar Practice What is an Adjective?

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English Grammar Practice

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 eight 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, Superlative
Most adjectives can be comparative or superlative, for example:

big, bigger, biggest
good, better, best
beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful