Last Updated on October 5, 2021
What is an Adjective? To help you understand what this part of speech is, and how it is used, this article provides detailed guidance on the definition and examples of Adjective, and how Adjectives can be used in a sentence.
Table of Contents
What is an Adjective?
An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or a pronoun. In general, the purpose of an adjective is to describe a noun or pronoun and provide more information about it. Adjectives provide answers to questions such as “What kind?” “Which one?” and “Whose is it?”
To demonstrate how adjectives work, let’s look at two example sentences. The first sentence has no adjectives, and the second sentence has two adjectives.
- Leslie bought shoes at the store.
- Leslie bought new shoes at the busy store.
Both of these sentences are perfectly fine. However, the second sentence gives more information than the first one does. The second sentence tells us the shoes that Leslie bought haven’t been used before and that the store that she went to had a lot of customers in it.
There are two ways that adjectives are used in sentences and clauses:
1. The adjective is right next to the noun/pronoun that it modifies. Most of the time, adjectives come before the nouns/pronouns they modify, but they can sometimes come after them:
- The blue birds built a nest. (The adjective blue modifies the noun birds.)
- I was looking for someone else. (The adjective else modifies the pronoun someone.)
2. The adjective follows a linking verb and functions as a subject complement.
- The house is old. (The adjective old follows the linking verb is. Old modifies the noun house as the subject complement of the sentence.)
In either case, it is possible to use multiple adjectives to modify the same noun or pronoun:
- It was a dark and stormy night.
- My big, goofy dog is named Buddy.
- The mirror was crooked, cracked, and dirty.
Examples of adjectives in a sentence
The following sentences give examples of how we use adjectives:
- Gavin is a smart guy.
- The big basket is full of red apples.
- The cocky rabbit lost the race to the careful tortoise.
- The old clock was broken.
- The masked villain’s plot was stopped by the brave, groovy teenagers and their goofy, cowardly dog.
How are adjectives used?
Adjectives can be used in several different ways when they modify nouns.
To describe nouns & pronouns
A common reason we use adjectives is to describe nouns and pronouns. Adjectives can describe a noun’s/pronoun’s characteristics. They can also describe approximate or exact quantities of nouns/pronouns. For example:
- Quality: The busy beavers built a big dam.
- Approximate amount: I gave bread to some ducks.
- Exact quantity: She has three sisters.
List of adjectives used to describe
There are a huge number of adjectives that you can use to describe people and things. Some examples are listed below, but you can probably think of other fun adjectives that can describe people and things.
- silly
- young
- many
- few
- twelve
- fifty
To compare nouns & pronouns
We also use adjectives to compare people and things to each other. When we compare two things, we use a comparative adjective. For example, if a black pencil has a length that exceeds that of a brown pencil, we would say that the black pencil is longer than the brown pencil. Longer is a comparative adjective. When we compare more than two things, we use a superlative adjective. For example, if we had three boxes that weighed 2, 5, and 10 pounds, we would say that the 10-pound box is the heaviest of the three boxes. A comparative adjective ends in -er or uses the words more or less, and a superlative adjective ends in -est or uses the words most or least.
List of adjectives used to compare
As long as it makes sense to do so, almost any adjective can be used as a comparative or superlative adjective. Listed below are just a few examples of adjectives that can be used to compare nouns and pronouns:
- cuter
- slower
- more massive
- less complicated
- toughest
- darkest
- most impressive
- least believable
Reference: thesaurus.com