Adjectives Educational Resources

An adjective is a part of speech that modifies or describes a noun or a pronoun, such as the way something feels, looks, sounds or tastes. It answers questions like Which one? What kind? How many? It’s important to note that adjectives do not modify verbs, adverbs or other adjectives. There are countless adjectives to describe things, and you can teach students how to use them in their own writing using our resources and tools.

If nouns are the thing, adjectives describe what that thing is like. Think of adjectives as activating our senses. Here are some common examples that we use every day to describe nouns and pronouns:

• Taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, delicious
• Touch: cold, hot, smooth, bumpy, hard
• Sound: quiet, loud, deafening, shrill, muffled
• Appearance: beautiful, ugly, tall, awkward, blonde
• Color: red, black, yellow, green, bright, dark
• Size: jumbo, immense, small, puny, majestic
• Amount: some, countless, enough, few, every
• Time: daily, regular, fast, slow, eternal
• Emotion: loving, friendly, calm, obnoxious, silly
• Person or personality: smart, rich, romantic, sassy, naughty

Adjectives have three degrees of comparison called positive, comparative and superlative. Regular adjectives with one syllable make their comparative and superlative forms by adding “er” and “est.”

Examples: loud, louder, loudest; cold, colder, coldest

Longer adjectives take on “more” and “most” in their degrees of comparison.

Examples: beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful; romantic, more romantic, most romantic

There are also words that we don’t think of as adjectives, because they don’t necessarily stir our senses. These include:

• Possessive adjectives: my, your, its, our, their
• Demonstrative adjectives: this, that, those, what
• Indefinite adjectives: some, many, a few
• Interrogative adjectives: which, what
• Articles: a, an, the

The world of adjectives is big and colorful. Once students master it, their reading and writing abilities will achieve a greater depth.