Adjectives … the life of the party!
Adjectives are my favorite English words.
If all the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, etc.) came to a party, the adjectives would be the most fun to have around.
Think about going to a party. The day after, your friend asks you how it was.
Well, if you had a good time, you have so many English adjectives to describe it. It was wonderful, amazing, awesome, fantastic, marvelous, energizing, entertaining, terrific, stupendous.
But if you had a bad time, maybe it was dreary, boring, dull, lackluster, depressing, awful, unpleasant, dreadful, horrible.
The more adjectives you learn, the better you will be able to describe moods, situations, experiences, places, and people.
So this blog post is going to be a little different. I’m going to be regularly updating it with new adjectives that would be a great addition to your vocabulary “toolbox.” If you have a favorite adjective, please include it in the “comments” section. Remember to keep checking back on this post, because I’ll be adding new words whenever I can.
Check Out These Adjectives
cutting-edge
So the last couple of days, I was attending some workshops at the University of Kentucky in a brand-new classroom building. There were six overhead projectors with automatic screens, so everyone could see what was being shown. There were speakers at every table so that people from one table could hear the people speaking from the table on the other side of the room. There was a central docking station for everyone’s plug so every participant could use their laptop.
This is what I would call a cutting-edge classroom. All the technology is the latest and the greatest. Cutting-edge is a wonderful adjective to use when you want to describe a new piece of technology, a new marketing plan, or a new way of doing things. Some good synonyms for cutting-edge include:
state-of-the-art
innovative
trendsetting
revolutionary
ambivalent
I like the word ambivalent because it often expresses how I feel. It means that you have mixed feelings about something. You can have ambivalent feelings about a person … some things about them you like, and some you don’t. You can have ambivalent feelings about an experience, like I’m having right now.
I used the photo above to express my ambivalence about traveling to Paris tomorrow! I’m excited and nervous. I’m a little scared of flying and I’m worried about missing my plane. I’m happy about visiting my favorite city and a little unhappy about the hassle of traveling. I’m looking forward to seeing my daughter, who’s going to come from London to see me, but I also know I’ll miss my husband and pets.
When you are asked your opinion about something, you can use the word ambivalent when you see both good and bad points. In another blog post, I wrote about what to say (or write) when you see two sides to an issue. So another expression you can use to indicate this is, “I’m ambivalent about this issue.”
vertiginous
Vertigo is the English word for that feeling you have when you are way up high and you look down and feel dizzy. Vertiginous is the adjective formed from that noun. It describes something that is extremely high or steep, and that may make you feel a little dizzy, scared, or sick when you look down. This is the view from our apartment in Paris. We are on the sixth floor (and the bedroom is on the seventh floor). I don’t like heights, but I do like being up high and watching everything going on in the streets below. When I look down, I think the view is rather vertiginous. Another adjective we can use is dizzying or, if you want to use a more general and common adjective, you can just say scary.
breathtaking
In English, when we talk about something that amazes us, we often say that it takes our breath away. You know that feeling … when your heart beats more quickly and your breathing becomes more rapid! So we turn that verb phrase into an adjective — breathtaking. We often use this word to describe views or sights or images. So this photo I took on a bridge in Paris shows a breathtaking view of a beautiful sunset over the River Seine. I love this adjective because it describes in a physical way the way we feel when we see something amazingly beautiful. Other adjectives we can use to mean the same thing are
spectacular
magnificent
amazing
stunning
incredible
magnificent
astounding
astonishing
awesome, and
awe-inspiring.
What breathtaking sights do you have in your country?
