Podcast 101 - B1 The order of adjectives

Hello, and welcome back to Practising English. Today I'm going to talk about homes, houses, flats and cottages and those words that we use to talk about places where we live or places we rent, perhaps, if we go on holiday. There is a grammar point I want to talk about too. That is the order of adjectives. For example, do we say, 'a large old pink house'? Or do we say, 'a large pink old house'?* So I'll be talking about the order of adjectives in this podcast. This is a B1 session or revision for B2 students. So here we go...

B1 order of adjectives - a pink house

When we go on holiday, it's nice to stay in rented accommodation instead of a hotel. The word 'accommodation' means a place where we stay temporarily - for example, on a business trip or when we go on holiday. What are the advantages of rented accommodation? Well, we have more freedom, don't we? In a hotel, we have to leave the room when the cleaners come round to clean the rooms. We don't have a kitchen in a hotel room, so you can't fry an egg or boil some water to make some soup. If we rent a house or flat as a place to spend our holiday, we can stay indoors as long as we want and we can cook meals and eat them too. Ok, so we're on holiday! Who wants to cook? Well, that's true, but we can still eat out if we want to. Sometimes it's nice to buy some local food - vegetables or fresh fish, for example, and cook them ourselves, isn't it?

Let's imagine, you're looking for accommodation to spend a week in the UK. You look on the Internet on English-speaking websites. You could look for an apartment or flat... Mmm, what's the difference? I don't really think there is a difference. It seems that the Americans use the word 'apartment' more and we usually say 'flat' in British English. We could also look for a house. A house would give us more independence as you're not sharing a building with anybody else. You will probably have a garden too. That means, if it's summer, we can sit outside in the garden and have our meals. We could also choose a cottage. A cottage is a house, in fact. But it is in the country and is usually prettier and more charming.

So, let's have a look at the advertisements on our website we have found on the Internet.

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious modern square pink English two-bedroom house in Cambridge city centre.
There's a garage and a small garden.
It's close to the historical buildings.
Bus stop just outside so good transport connections.

Well, that sounds an interesting. Square and pink! A rather strange description! However, there are four of us. Two adults and two children. We want to visit Cambridge so having a place in the city centre would be nice. There's a garden too, so the children could play outside if they wanted too. It's spacious - so that means it's large with lots of space, which is great when you have two noisy children. And it's a pink colour! Well, I'm not too sure about that! Anyway, let's look at those adjectives used to describe the house:

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious modern square pink English two-bedroom house.

Analysing the order of adjectives

Now, we say the adjectives in a certain order in English. As you know, the adjectives come before the noun. If we put several adjectives before the noun, we usually put them in a certain order. The order depends on the category of the adjective. It may sound strange if those adjectives are not in the correct order. On the other hand, it's not a serious mistake because the meaning will usually be the same. What is the order of the adjectives in English?

I'm not going to mention all the adjective types in this podcast. Here are the most common ones:

First we mention the quality or our opinion of something. As we are talking about houses and flats, etc. I'll mention examples connected to this subject:

an attractive house, an elegant flat, a luxury house, a quiet cottage, a clean house!

Well, it's nice to know it's clean and not dirty! Notice that if we put two adjectives together of the same category, we separate them by the word 'and': a clean and cosy house. Both the words 'clean' and 'cosy' talk about a quality the house has. If we have more than two adjectives of the same category, we separate them by commas and the last two adjectives with the word 'and'.

A quiet, clean and cosy house.

The next thing we talk about is the size - how big it is:

A large house, a small cottage, a spacious flat, a tiny apartment.

The description of the size of the house in the advertisement is: spacious - lots of space. Notice we don't usually separate the adjectives with commas if the adjectives are of different categories - only if they are the same category. So now we've got:

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious house.

After the adjective talking about size, comes an adjective, which mentions the age:

An old house, an ancient building, a historic building, a new flat, a modern apartment.

So now we have:

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious modern house.

The next category of adjectives are those that talk about shape: square, round, rectangular, triangular... and then the colour. Perhaps we don't usually use this sort of shape adjectives in a description of a holiday home. Neither is the colour of the building important. However, both adjective categories come in our advertisement. So the phrase for our Cambridge holiday accommodation so far is:

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious modern square pink house.

If we have the nationality, we would put that next: English, Spanish. Italian, French, Swiss... and also the material it is made of: stone, brick, wooden, glass, a steel and glass building! Right next to the noun, we put an adjective that says what type of house it is: a holiday home, a residential building, an office building, a family apartment, a seaside cottage. Our final description then reads:

A quiet, clean and cosy spacious modern square pink English two-bedroom house.

You know something. I don't think I like it anymore. Too many adjectives! There must be something wrong with it!

B1 order of adjectives - a seaside cottage

Here's another advertisement on the website:

A friendly two-bedroom seaside cottage with a large garden. Central heating. Air-conditioning. Well-equipped kitchen. Half an hour from Cambridge by car. Idyllic!

Now, doesn't that sound lovely! I think I'll go there for my holiday this year!

Summary: order of adjectives

7, Quality or opinion (quiet, clean and cosy)

6, Size (spacious)

5, Age (modern)

4, Shape (square)

3, Colour (pink)

2, Nationality, material (English)

1, What type (two-bedroom)

0, Noun (house).

*So the answer to the question at the beginning of the podcast is: a large old pink house.