What is English Sentence Structure? English Subject-Verb Agreement The 4 Types of Sentence Structure

Word order of adjectives

The order of adjectives before a noun is usually the following:

Opinion – Size – Age – Shape – Color – Origin – Material – Purpose
If we take the first letter of each one, it creates OSASCOMP which is an easy way to remember the order. Let’s look at an example about describing a bag.

• 
  It is an ugly small old thin red Italian cotton sleeping bag
  

It is not common to have so many adjectives before a noun, but I do this so you can see the correct order of adjectives.
Ugly is an opinion, small is a size, old refers to age, thin refers to shape, red is a color, Italian refers to its origin, cottonrefers to the material the bag is made of, sleeping is the purpose of the bag.
I will go into more details about each of these categories in a moment. First, let’s see two more examples:

• 
  A beautiful long white French silk wedding dress.
  
• 
  Large ancient Greek clay flower vases.
  

Let’s study the first one.
Here we have a dress. Dress is a noun, the name of a thing. Let’s describe this dress.
What type of dress is it? What is the purpose of this dress?
It is used for weddings so it is…

• 
  a wedding dress.
  

Let’s image the dress is made of silk. It isn’t made of plastic or gold, it is made of silk.
Silk is a material so it goes before the purpose. We say it is:

• 
  a silk wedding dress.
  

Now, this dress was made in France. France is a noun, its adjective is French.
Its origin is French. Its origin, French, goes before the material, Silk. So we say it is:

• 
  a French silk wedding dress.
  

Let’s add the color of the dress. What color is it? White. Color goes before Origin so we say it is:

• 
  a white French silk wedding dress.
  

What is the shape of this dress? Is it long or short? It is long. The adjective Long goes under the category of shape because shape also covers weight or length. (We will see more about this in a moment) We now say it is:

• 
  a long white French silk wedding dress.
  

Let’s add one more adjective. Is the dress beautiful or ugly? Well, you should always say it is beautiful or it will ruin her wedding day.
Beautiful is an opinion and adjectives about opinions go before all the other adjectives. So our final description of the dress is:

• 
  a beautiful long white French silk wedding dress.
  

Now of course we don’t normally add so many adjectives before a noun. This example is just to show you the order of adjectives.
BONUS:
Before the adjectives you will normally have the Determiner.
Determiner: The determiner tells us if the noun is singular or plural, definite or indefinite

• 
  a, an, the, my, your, four, those, some etc
  

And then we have the adjectives that refer to…
Opinion: Explains what we think about something. This is usually our opinion, attitude or observations. These adjectives almost always come before all other adjectives.

• 
  beautiful, boring, stupid, delicious, useful, lovely, comfortable