Grammar

Gradable or ungradable? List of adjectives

Gradable Adjectives

Some people find this site by googling "Is xyz gradable?". Some others are looking for lists of gradable and ungradable adjectives. So I thought I'd try and make a table. This is not meant to be a complete list, but as people ask about other adjectives I'll try and add them to the list.

Testing for gradability

There are two tests to see whether an adjective is gradable or not:

Can we use very as an intensifier before it?
Can we make a comparative from it: x-er or more x?

Try doing these tests yourself with any adjective, but I realise that sometimes it is difficult for a non-native speaker to hear whether something sounds "right" or not.

The listings here are my own interpretations based on those two tests.

Notes

Colours - most colours are gradable, but black and white are usually seen as absolute.

Adjectives with suffixes 1 - it seems to me that most adjectives formed with the suffixes: -able, -ic, -ish, -like are gradable.

Adjectives with suffixes 2 - on the other hand most adjectives formed with the suffix: -less are ungradable.

Adjectives with suffixes 3 - some adjectives formed with the suffix: -ful are gradable, some are not.

(sl) = slang, an asterisk (*) means that a gradable adjective is sometimes used with absolutely as well as very.

Three lists appear when you select a letter:

Gradable adjectives - can be made into comparatives
Extreme adjectives - strong versions of gradable adjectives
Absolute adjectives - self-standing adjectives with no gradable equivalent

There are really too many absolute adjectives to list, so I've only put in some of the more obvious ones, and only those that can be used with intensfiers such as absolutely ot totally.

Select adjectives beginning with:

Your list will appear here

Gradable and ungradable adjectives - lesson
Extreme adjectives matching game
Lesson on intensifiers

Links

Gradable and ungradable

English Club - Explanation and exercise
British Council - Pretty basic
New Headway Advanced - Short exercise

Adjective lists

Learn English - Common adjectives table with look up
ESL Desk - c700 adjectives with look up
Moms who think - 1100 adjectives
Thesaurus.com - Good for finding synonyms

- Mastering Negativity
Learners of English face a formidable task. Certain areas of the language seem to have very few rules that you can learn. Instead you have to memorise all of the various different exceptions. One of these areas is forming the negatives (opposites) of...

- Word Families
King's College, Cambridge - photo by Andrew Dunn at Wikmedia Commons Complete the word families from the word given. Based loosely on the Academic Word List (AWL), these exercises will give you some practice in word formation. Notes Where...

- Negative Prefixes With Adjectives - Quiz
We often use prefixes to give adjectives a negative meaning: un- The most common, can appear before any letter in- The next most common, appears mainly before the letters a,c,d,e,f,h,o,s,v il- Appears...

- Gradable And Ungradable Adjectives
Why should we be interested in whether adjectives are gradable or not?There are two main reasons why knowing a bit about the gradabilty of adjectives is useful to students.1. - it largely decides what intensifiers, adverbs like quite, very and absolutely,...

- Intensifiers Are Ridiculously Easy To Understand
This post is mainly a discussion of one intensifier - ridiculously. For a more general lesson on intensifiers, please see my new post here The Grammarphobia Blog recently published a post where a reader complained about the use of the adverb ridiculously...

Grammar