Tips: The Royal Order of Adjectives

"Big blue eyes" sounds right, but "blue big eyes" sounds wrong. There is a rule describing the order English adjectives are used in. It's called the Royal Order of Adjectives.


1) Opinion or judgment -- beautiful, ugly, easy, fast, interesting

2) Size -- small, tall, short, big

3) Age -- young, old, new, historic, ancient

4) Shape -- round, square, rectangular

5) Color -- red, black, green, purple

6) Nationality -- French, Asian, English, Russian

7) Material -- wooden, metallic, plastic, glass, paper

8) Purpose or Qualifier -- foldout sofa, fishing boat, racing car


So it's "the weathered giant old dome-shaped gray Galapagos tortoise shell" or "the shiny little yellow Egyptian gold coin."

Note that this doesn't necessarily apply to phrases and cliches like "tall, dark and handsome," which going by the rule would be "handsome, tall and dark." So, as with everything, there are exceptions.

You're almost never going to see all those classes of adjectives in a single description. It's more likely to be "the little brown guard dog" or "the crusty old Englishman." On that last one, note that "English" doesn't come under "Nationality" — in that case it's a qualifier of "man." So be careful to correctly classify things. In the same way, it would be "the tall young kid read a fascinating new short story." It wouldn't be "the tall young kid read a fascinating short new story" because the object of the sentence isn't "story," it's "short story." Short in that case is a qualifier, not an adjective.

A weathered giant old dome-shaped gray Galapagos tortoise found a shiny little yellow Egyptian gold coin. The rest is history.