In grammar, 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, "main", "more", and "traditional" are adjectives.
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, French and Spanish use "honger hebben", "avoir faim" and "tener hambre" respectively (literally "to have hunger", hunger being a noun), and where Hebrew uses the adjective "????" (zaq?q, 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.
In English, the word "adjective" is frequently used loosely for any part of speech, including nouns and prepositions, when it is used attributively.[1] See adjectival phrase.