Where does our English Royal Order of Adjectives list come from? Metaphysics.

An argument for the origin of the English Royal Order of adjectives.

Photo by Jaseel T on Unsplash

Once a quarter or so, someone will send me a reference to the Royal Order of Adjectives in English:

Our order is invisible because — like all philosophy — most people like thinking a thing without thinking it through, without examining its ends, its origin, its causality. Folks like using things more than they like thinking about the ends of said usage.

But if it’s worth thinking anything, it’s worth thinking it all the way through.

And so when the list reemerges, it’s often coupled with this complete bafflement as to why it even exists. It’s secret! It’s invisible! We all use it and couldn’t list it! And this: where on earth did it come from?

However, like all things involving language, its roots are in poetry and philosophy.¹ Someone will always disagree with this and I’ll gently point them to N.S. in the etymology section of certain words in the dictionary, which stands for National Socialist — indicating a Nazi invented word.²

I wonder what new words are being invented by our age of Abbeförderung (“disappearing”), abgeräumt (“clearing away”), Ehestandsdarlehen, and the assassinations of small children by trained snipers?

Cheery thought.

In any case, philosophy and poetry give birth to words as I argued in What is a poem? In this instance, I have a hunch that this formalization of the adjective order showed up in the Middle English period by way of Latin (as many loan words often came, including very early inside the Beowulf text) during the later proliferation of Aquinas’s texts and therefore the demand for translations of Aristotle.

To be clear, I’m referring here to the list for the Royal Order of adjectives we use intuitively in English for the beautiful big broken ovoid old silver Byzantine metal bathroom primping mirror and things like it. God knows I used this to excess in Bell Hammers because that’s how my hillbilly relatives talk all the time.

First, let’s get the adjective order down. I’ll be borrowing from Cambridge but teasing it out a bit more:

order number (1, 2…) — relating to — examples

1. opinion — unusual, lovely, beautiful

2. size or quantity — big, small, tall

3. physical quality — thin, rough, untidy

4. shape — round, square, rectangular

5. age — young, old, youthful

6. color — blue, red, pink

7. origin — Dutch, Japanese, Turkish

8. material — metal, wood, plastic

9. type — general-purpose, four-sided, U-shaped

10. purpose — cleaning, hammering, cooking

Now some places invert age and shape, for instance. Others might swap size and opinion, though that sounds almost childish (big beautiful bill comes immediately to mind, unfortunately, please forgive me or, I suppose, consider why that’s the case there).

The Cut referenced Slate where Katy Waldman said that adjectives lists function in every language, but the closer we get to the noun, the more we’re talking about a noun’s innate properties.³ That’s a solid start, but it’s insufficient for me.

What do we mean by innateness? Perhaps substance? What did Chaucer think of the Aristotelian concept of substance?

Certainly Chaucer’s use of Aristotle has been noted elsewhere — he lived well after Aquinas and the translation revival.⁴ He certainly was familiar with the accidents, such as with The Pardoner’s Tale, in which a charlatan has changed the accidents — adjectives, mostly — though not the substance of “relics” he’s selling:

"Nay, nay!" quod he, "thanne have I Cristes curs!
"Nay, nay!" he said, "then I will have Christ's curse!
Lat be," quod he, "it shal nat be, so theech!
Let it be," he said, "it shall not be, as I may prosper!
Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,
Thou would make me kiss thine old underpants,
And swere it were a relyk of a seint,
And swear it was a relic of a saint,
Though it were with thy fundement depeint!
Though it were stained by thy fundament!
But, by the croys which that Seint Eleyne fond,
But, by the cross that Saint Helen found,
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
I would I had thy testicles in my hand
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Instead of relics or a container for relics.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
Have them cut off, I will help thee carry them;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!"
They shall be enshrined in a hog's turd!"

So Chaucer was certainly aware of the philosophy of the accidents of a thing, verses its substance:

And turnen substaunce into accident
And turn substance into outward appearance
To fulfille al thy likerous talent!
To fulfill all thy gluttonous desire!

Yet consider the Pardoner’s appearance in the general prologue of the Canterbury Tales. His hair is described as yellow, smooth, small, spread, and unhooded. This is an exact inversion of the adjectival order, which is what the Pardoner does with his scams: he moves substantial things away from their innate being to become something else entirely — the piece beneath his underwear masked as a relic. Perhaps still an old relic, but not that kind…

Arthur Garfield Kennedy wrote this genius little article “On the Substantivation of Adjectives in Chaucer.”⁵ In it, he says that adjectives are used seldom in Chaucer because Chaucer is constantly giving adjectives substance (which, if so, the Pardoner’s Tale may double as a self-reflection on his own literary method). It’s a fascinating little study, but if I linger too long, we’ll lose the thread:

All of this seems to me to formalize the categories — the praedicamenta — in Aristotle’s Κατηγορίαι from his Organon. In it, Aristotle lists out anything that could be the subject or predicate of a proposition. Ackrill’s translation renders it this way:

Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is-sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned. (1b25-2a4)

Its substance would be defined by the four causes — material, formal, efficient, final — and then the other nine categories would describe properties or attributes that aren’t essential to its nature.

Here’s what’s fascinating: beyond this introductory paragraph, when Aristotle actually moves to explain the categories, the order shifts a bit. That shift looks exactly like the royal order of adjectives, with the odd exception of quantity that seems to be more of an accident of arithmetic than anything (and the double fascinating exception that sometimes quantity and opinion are swapped in various royal lists of adjectives). Aristotle moves from to quality (types a, b, c) through to relation (and, in the argument itself, its close connection to the d-type of quality, shape) on to the when and where of its origin. Its doing or being affected (action or passion) would be the verb of the sentence, and so would be irrelevant here, though relevant for the total meaning of the phenomenon described by any given sentence.

What would remain, then, would be a definition of its substance moving from the most basic materials like carbon and water through to the evidence of its efficient causes and ultimately on to its final and formal cause, doubly entangled with its very origin.

In other words, yes the list goes from least innate to most innate. But it’s a list that moves from the least consequential of its accidents — what people or the narrator think about it —  and towards its most objective being — the nature of the thing itself, its true name, nominative, noun.

Take that adjective list again, and overlay the categories and you’ll see what I mean:

1. opinion — unusual, lovely, beautiful — quality (a - habits and dispositions); quality (b - capacity, disposition); quality (c - affective)

2. size or quantity — big, small, tall — quantity (again, math may have messed with the inversion here, though some people rank it earlier even when it sounds childish such as with the big beautiful bill - either way would favor Aristotle)

3. physical quality — thin, rough, untidy — relation

4. shape — round, square, rectangular —  relation + quality (d - shape, listed right before the relation passage)

5. age — young, old, youthful — relation

6. color — blue, red, pink — relation or quality (c - affective) it would become “relation” if the adjective used was comparative such as “bluer ball”

7. origin — Dutch, Japanese, Turkish — when and where

8. material — metal, wood, plastic — the material cause of the substance

9. type — general-purpose, four-sided, U-shaped — evidence of the efficient cause of the substance (a single-use flare gun tells us a lot about the munitions manufacturer; a reusable diaper tells us a lot about the tailor)

10. purpose — cleaning, hammering, cooking — the final cause of the substance

    1. noun (name) — man, car, tree — name of substance that enhypostasizes the formal cause

    2. verb — its current action or passion; potentially both if multiple verbs present

In other words, if any of you get irritated with this article and decided to call me that stupid ugly little roughshod round young bleach-white New York general-purpose book-writing man, thanks to Aristotle you’ll at least give me the last word on my nature. Snatch me away or disappear me even, but a man I remain — one who loves and defends his neighbors. Abbeförderung be damned.

And I can even rest in my reality as a man, whatever you think of my hair, body, heart, and mind or neighbors. We must choose that Royal order — our opinions turning to ash and wind in the face of the very real live human soul before us — or we must choose to turn those real relics of the real presence into our own testicles.

1. This is, after all, why we need the Trivium.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Nazi_Germany

3. “The Unexpectedly Existential Roots of Adjective Order,” accessed July 10, 2025, https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-unexpectedly-existential-roots-of-adjective-order.html. Katy Waldman, “The Secret Rules of Adjective Order,” Slate, August 6, 2014, https://slate.com/culture/2014/08/the-study-of-adjective-order-and-gsssacpm.html.

4. Marshall W. Stearns, “A Note on Chaucer’s Use of Aristotelian Psychology,” Studies in Philology 43, no. 1 (1946): 15–21. Denise N. Baker, “Chaucer and Moral Philosophy: The Virtuous Women of ‘the Canterbury Tales,’” Medium �vum 60, no. 2 (1991): 241–56, https://doi.org/10.2307/43632567. Darragh Greene, “‘What Is This World?’: Chaucer, Realism, and Metaphysics,” in Literature and Its Language: Philosophical Aspects, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022), 149–71, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12330-6_8. Stephen H. Rigby, “Aristotle for Aristocrats and Poets: Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum as Theodicy of Privilege,” The Chaucer Review 46, no. 3 (2012): 259–313.

5. Arthur Garfield Kennedy, “On the Substantivation of Adjectives in Chaucer,” n.d.