Why do adjectives sound wrong in certain orders?

Question

Why does it sound correct to say "little old lady" but not "old little lady?" Or "great, green dragons" sounds correct while "green, great dragons" doesn't?

Answer 1

Adjectives generally have a specific order in which they are used, and this order can affect how natural or grammatically correct a sentence sounds. In English, the standard order for adjectives is:

1. Opinion or judgment (e.g. beautiful, lovely)
2. Size (e.g. small, large)
3. Age (e.g. young, old)
4. Shape (e.g. round, square)
5. Color (e.g. red, blue)
6. Origin (e.g. French, Chinese)
7. Material (e.g. wooden, cotton)
8. Qualifier (e.g. two-story, all-weather)

This order is not set in stone, and there is some flexibility in the way that adjectives can be used. However, when adjectives are placed in a different order than the standard, it can make the sentence sound awkward or incorrect. For example, "old little lady" sounds wrong because "little" should come before "old" according to the standard order for adjectives. "Green, great dragons" sounds incorrect because "great" should come before "green" according to the standard order.

Answer 2

The answer is that there is a rule in English that native speakers don't learn, but all are aware of, which dictates what order certain classes of adjectives can go in. Adjectives can fall into one of the following categories: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose. They must go in that order. An example taken from a book called The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth has been popularized recently; a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Messing with the word order will sound wrong to native English speakers' ears.

There are some exceptions-- for example, Big Bad Wolf violates this rule, because it is following a different rule with has less to do with semantics and more to do with phonetics. Bad is an opinion, and big relates to size, so according to the first rule, we should be saying Bad Big Wolf. Because of the similar sounds in big and bad (both begining with a B and both ending with what is referred to as a voiced stop in phonetics), the words must be placed in an order so that the vowel sounds go as follows: i, a, o. Other examples of this rule involve "chit-chat," "singsong," "flipflop," and "hip-hop." This rule is called ablaut reduplication.

This is important for non-native speakers to learn in order to achieve fluency in English, but it's just cool for native English speakers to learn about-- it's one of my favorite language facts.