Vocabulary improvement is more than learning new words. You won’t be able to get the most out of the words you learn unless you know how to use them correctly. Part of this knowledge is being able to identify what part of speech a word is. The main parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adverbs, articles, prepositions, and adjectives. We recently talked about how to use adverbs correctly, and today we’ll look at adjectives.

As we noted in the earlier post, adverbs tell you how something happens, by “modifying” a verb. Adjectives modify nouns, not verbs. Rather than describing how something is acting, an adjective describes how many, or what kind, or which particular somethings you’re referring to. Here are some examples:

Please bring me the yellow bucket.
There are fifty-two weeks in a calendar year.
That was the shortest lecture that professor has ever given.

In the first example, there might be several buckets, but only the yellow one is needed. The adjective yellow makes it clear which bucket is being requested. Numbers are also adjectives, because they describe the quantity of something. This description doesn’t need to be exact; we could insert the adjective many in the second sentence instead of “fifty-two” and still be understood. The adjective in the third sentence describes what kind of lecture the professor gave.

You can have more than one adjective modifying a noun. For example, you might talk about the ten large old red trucks in the garage. Notice the order of those four adjectives – in English, there’s a specific sequence of adjective types. Saying “the red old large ten trucks” is not grammatically correct (although in languages other than English, it may be). If you’re using more than one adjective in your description, follow this sequence:

first, any numbers (four, a dozen, many)
second, descriptions of size (large, smallest)
third, descriptions of age (older, teen-aged)
fourth, descriptions of shape (round, arrow-like)
fifth, descriptions of color (blue, grayish)

When you’re learning a new adjective, a good way to make sure you know how to use it is to think of some nouns that it might modify. If you’re learning the adjective cerulean (a poetic way to say “blue”) you might come up with this phrase: the cerulean petals of the wild chicory plants. Add another adjective, and then one more – use your creativity! – and soon you’ll be writing something like this: A thousand gossamer-thin cerulean petals from the wild chicory plants in the meadow looked like pieces of the sky that had shattered and fallen to earth.

Well, maybe not. That poetic, flowery (two more adjectives!) language isn’t for everyone. On the other hand, if you have a strong mental image, you’re more likely to remember the word. In this case, you might even try your hand at drawing and create a quick visual image in your vocabulary journal, coloring the flowers a bright sky-blue shade.

Adjectives will enrich your vocabulary, so make sure you know how to use them correctly.