Writing Notes: The "Order" of Adjectives
"[adjectives] absolutely have to be in this order:
opinion,
size,
age,
shape,
color,
origin,
material,
purpose, and then
the noun."
—Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
The Royal Order of Adjectives (credited to Professor Charles Darling)
Is essentially the same:
observation or opinion,
size and shape,
age,
color,
origin,
material, and
qualifier (a word closely linked to the noun, like the school in “school bus”), and then
the noun.
Exceptions to the Rule
Sometimes a violation of the order is about emphasis and clarity.
Example: You want to borrow one of your friend’s many felt hats, in particular one of two lovely old felt hats that differ only in color. You will distinguish between the hats with the pertinent adjective coming first: the green old felt hat, rather than the yellow one.
Professor Keith Folse asserts that all we really have to do is put the adjective that is most like a noun closest to the noun itself.
So if we want to describe the word hat with the words old, felt, green, and lovely, we can consider felt to be most nounlike—felt being in fact a noun that refers to a particular kind of cloth or material.
Green is often an adjective, but it is also commonly a noun (as in “green is a lovely color”), and so it comes next.
Old and lovely both can be either a noun or an adjective (“days of old,” “my lovelies”), but old is more commonly a noun than lovely is, which means we get “lovely old green felt hat.”
Which happens to be the same thing we’d get by following either the Forsyth or Royal orders.
Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs
