Adjective

an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.

Adjectives are one of the traditional eight English parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that were formerly considered to be adjectives. In this paragraph, "traditional" is an adjective, and in the preceding paragraph, "main" and "more" are.

Most but not all languages have adjectives. Those that do not typically use words of another part of speech, often verbs, to serve the same semantic function; for example, such a language might have a verb that means "to be big", and would use a construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what English expresses as "big house". Even in languages that do have adjectives, one language's adjective might not be another's; for example, while English uses "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), Dutch and French use "honger hebben" and "avoir faim" respectively (literally "to have hunger", hunger being a noun), and where Hebrew uses the adjective "זקוק" (zaqūq, roughly "in need of"), English uses the verb "to need".

Adjectives form an open class of words in most languages that have them; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. However,Bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese adjectives (i-adjectives) are closed class (as are native verbs), though nouns (which are open class) can be used in the genetive and there is the separate class of adjectival nouns (na-adjectives) which is also open, and functions similarly to noun adjuncts in English.