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Getting Your Adjectives in Proper Order (John Bercow Would Be Happy)

By Theda C. Snyder

Mixing up your adjectives can raise eyebrows at best or muddle your message at worst. When in doubt, consider these tips for following the Royal Order of Adjectives.

John Bercow was the Speaker of the British House of Commons who famously and repeatedly yelled โ€œOrderโ€ to keep the members in line.

A Noble Approach to Communication

โ€œI showed him the blue, secret, big invention.โ€

What kind of word salad is this? Maybe someone is admitting disclosure of a trade secret, but the language is sure off-putting.

The reason is that the sentence does not conform to the hierarchy of descriptive adjectives rule.

When Lining Up Adjectives, Do What Comes Naturally

Native English speakers generally line up their adjectives in an order that seems natural. If you are not a native speaker or just a bit discombobulated that day, mixing up your adjectives can raise eyebrows at best or muddle your message at worst. If you are listening to an important, scrambled message, such as in a deposition, you might need to clarify the misordered adjectives.

Determiners Before Descriptors

Some types of adjectives precede the descriptive stuff:

  • Articles are the ever-present the, a or an.
  • Demonstratives, this, that, these and those, specify the noun.
  • Possessives can start with a noun, e.g., the studentโ€™s chair, the schoolโ€™s motto, or with a pronoun, e.g., my, his, our, their. As in the chair and motto examples, possessives frequently appear with another determiner.
  • Quantifiers let you know how many youโ€™re dealing with. That might be a number or a generalization, such as many, a few, not much, all.

The types of determiners can be chopped into as many as seven categories.

King Charles III Would Approve

English professor Charles Darling, who died in 2006, made sense of all this for the students of Capital Community College in Hartford, Connecticut, and ultimately the world, through his popular website Guide to Grammar and Writing.  

The Royal Order of Adjectives

With tongue apparently firmly in cheek, Darling created the Royal Order of Adjectives, shown below. The name emphasizes the importance Darling assigned to the rule.

CHARLES DARLING Chart: The Royal Order of Adjectives

The Royal Order of Adjectives dictates that your descriptive adjectives should generally appear in this order:

  • Observation or Opinion: The speakerโ€™s personal evaluation of the noun. Examples are good or bad, pretty or ugly, secret or public.
  • Physical description:
    • Size: Words like big, small, minuscule, titanic.
    • Shape: The noun may have been short, curvy or rectangular.
    • Age: Whether the item named by the noun is old, new, recent or obsolete.
    • Color: Self-explanatory.
  • Origin: Words describing the geographic or cultural origin of the noun, such as American or Puritan.
  • Material: What was the noun made of? Wood? Metal? Plastic?
  • Qualifier or purpose: Finally, adjectives that describe how the noun is used immediately precede the noun, such as badminton racquet or squash racquet.

Linguists have almost unanimously adopted Darlingโ€™s rule. Grammarly seems to be the outlier, separating size and shape by inserting age between those categories. If you donโ€™t like the way Grammarly orders your adjectives, feel free to reject the suggestion and keep size and shape together.

Emphasis Matters When Ordering Adjectives

The most natural way to emphasize an adjective seems to be to place it immediately before the noun. For example, to distinguish among objects of different sizes, one might refer to the secret, blue, big invention as opposed to the secret, blue, small invention.

Exceptions, Exceptions

Notwithstanding the near unanimity of agreement on Darlingโ€™s rule, there will always be exceptions.

All of us are familiar with the big, bad wolf. Nobody would call that character the bad, big wolf.

Just because you could string together a long list of descriptors doesnโ€™t mean you should.

To avoid confusion and loss of attention, good communicators limit descriptive adjectives to no more than three. Instead, create a new sentence and consider whether you can use a different part of speech. An action verb such as โ€œoptimizeโ€ can be a better choice than the adjectival form โ€œoptimal.โ€

Separate descriptive adjectives with a comma, but do not insert a comma before the noun.

You may be tempted in some instances to include a phrase after several adjectives and before the noun which would normally be set off by commas. Such a sentence structure should sound an alarm that your sentence may be too long and complicated and needs simplification.

What matters in the end is that our communication is clear and not so awkward that the message recipient pays more attention to the grammar than the meaning.


Lawyerโ€™s Marketing Journal

Teddy Snyder, author ofย Women Rainmakerโ€™s Best Marketing Tips, has designed a journal that is ideal for tracking marketing and BD activities, ideas and inspiration. Undated pages give you the flexibility to start today.


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Teddy Snyder Theda C. Snyder

Theda โ€œTeddyโ€ Snyder mediates civil disputes, workersโ€™ compensation and insurance coverage cases, including COVID-19 related coverage disputes, in person or by video. Teddy has practiced in a variety of settings and frequently speaks and writes about settlements and the business of law. She was a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and is the author of four ABA books, including โ€œWomen Rainmakersโ€™ Best Marketing Tips, 4th Editionโ€ as well as โ€œPersonal Injury Case Evaluationโ€ available on Amazon.com. Based in Los Angeles, Teddy can be found at SnyderMediations.com and on Twitter @SnyderMediation.

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