English Adjectives

Adjectives describe nouns: The tall man eats the beef pie. The words 'tall' and 'beef' in this sentence are adjectives because they describe the nouns (the man and the pie).

Comparative adjective: The dog is bigger than the cat.

Superlative adjective: The giraffe is the tallest of all the animals

Comparative Adjectives

Comparative adjectives compare two nouns. The comparative adjective usually ends in ‘er’ except for when the stem adjective is more than one (or sometimes two) syllables, in which case use the word ‘more’ or ‘less’ before it. For example, ‘The diamond is more beautiful than the emerald’ or ‘the emerald is less beautiful than the diamond’.

Superlative Adjectives

Superlative adjectives usually take ‘est’ at the end of the stem adjective except for when adjective is more than one (or sometimes) two syllables in which case ‘the most’ or ‘the least’ is used before it. E.g. ‘the most interesting film’ or ‘the least interesting film’

Rarely, some one syllable words also require ‘more’/’the most’ in order to express a comparison, for example, the word ‘bored’ needs ‘more bored’ and ‘the most bored’. For example, ‘I am bored, you are more bored, but he is the most bored’.

Irregular Adjectives

Irregular adjectives do not use the stem adjective to make the comparative and superlative, they require a different word altogether. For example, the adjective ‘good’ uses ‘better’ as its comparative adjective, and ‘the best’ as its superlative adjective.

Example sentences:

	The book was less interesting than the film, but the television programme was the most boring of them all.
	The bus was slower than the train, but the aeroplane was the fastest of the transport options.

Possessive adjectives

Possessive adjectives are special adjectives which are used before a noun to denote possession of that noun by someone or something. The possessive adjectives are: my, your, his, her, its (no apostrophe), our, their.

Example sentences with possessive adjectives:

My hat is the biggest

Your car is faster than her motorbike

His birthday is in March

It is their turn to come to our house tomorrow.

That house has its window open