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Auctorial descriptives

Adjectives compose a fundamental category of words in most languages. In most languages, most adjectives can be used both attributively and predicatively, can be graded, and can be modified by an adverb.

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject, giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that used to be considered adjectives but that are now recognized to be different.

Not all languages have adjectives, but most, including English, do. (English adjectives include big, old, and tired, among many others.) Those that don't typically use words of another part of speech, often verbs, to serve the same semantic function; for example, such a language might have a verb that means "to be big", and would use a construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what English expresses as "big house". Even in languages that do have adjectives, one language's adjective might not be another's; for example, where English has "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), French has "avoir faim" (literally "to have hunger"), and where Hebrew has the adjective "צריך" (roughly "in need of"), English uses the verb "to need".

In most languages with adjectives, they form an open class of words; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation.

Classes of adjectives

There are 6 classes of adjectives in the English language:

Numeric: six, three hundred

Quantitative: more, all, some, half, more than enough

Qualitative: Relates to colour, size, smell etc.

Possessive: my, his, their, your

Interrogative: which, whose, what

Demonstrative: this, that, those, these

Adjectives also have different levels of intensity (See, superlative, comparative, nominative)