In English language, an adjective, a part of speech, is a "describing word", modifying a noun much like a determiner. Past participle in sentences are often woked as adjective.

In the examples, the adjective is highlighted in bold.

• It is a cold day.
• He is a kind man.
• I like blue sky.
• The sky is blue.
• The joke she told was so funny, I could not stop laughing all day.
• He went mad.

In the first set of examples the adjective simply describes a noun. In the later examples the adjective forms a predicate. Some adjectives in English, such as "_my_" or "_bonkers_" can not be used both ways.

In English, adjectives come before the noun they describe. In French, they usually come after the noun.

An adjectival phrase is a phrase with an adjective as its head. (e.g. full of toys) . Adjectival phrases may occur as premodifiers to a noun (a bin full of toys), or as predicatives to a verb (the bin is full of toys).

Non-standard adjectives in English

Following is a list of English adjectives that are non-standard in that they are not derived from the same root as the corresponding noun, or they are based on the same root but in a way that is non-intuitive even to a native English speaker. In some cases, the non-standard adjective is merely an alternative to a standard one. For example, for an adjective form of 'charity' we could say 'eleemosynary', though in most cases 'charitable' would work just as well. Also some of the adjectives have a similar noun form, which acts as an alternative noun.