Can you name the most commonly used adjectives?

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Most Common Adjectives Quiz

Rating:	Report a mistake
Published: April 14th, 2009
Category: Language
Plays: 106,476

Tags: common, adjective, used, rank

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	jsyooner:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:15 GMT	45 points
	This is much more difficult than I thought

	jawa88:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:19 GMT	10 points
	Agreed. It was really interesting, but waaay hard =( even singing the School House Rock song barely helped

	MovieDynamic:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:24 GMT	0 points
	Huh... very surprised at the lack of "weird" and "cool." STRANGE!

	MovieDynamic:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:25 GMT	20 points
	No "nice" either!? This is so bizarre!

	MovieDynamic:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:43 GMT	4 points
	Why is that voted down? Wouldn't you expect "nice" to be one of the most commonly said adjectives as well? It's quite shocking, its omission.

	clavinfield:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:45 GMT	16 points
	Tough quiz! This is another case of racking my brains for guesses, only coming up with a few answers, and realizing how many obvious answers I missed when time is up.

	Morbo:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:47 GMT	17 points
	Damn, this was hard (which, ironically, was NOT an answer). No colors, no states of mind (i.e., happy, sad, etc.). I got one right -- high, which I think I'll be if I ever try this beast of a quiz again.

	sactoshc:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:50 GMT	10 points
	7 of 25...Holy Moly! This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. A lot of the ones I thought were slam dunks were nowhere to be found.

	kev1024:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 04:59 GMT	16 points
	.3% for 16-24 and 1% for all? Cheating at sporcle quizzes...

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	jaspa:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:14 GMT	1 point
	On a completely different but important topic, what happened to davidr? Zero comments in the past two weeks or so.

	shamrock:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:18 GMT	0 points
	good news? CBS must have it bad......

	ZeppoMarxist:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:21 GMT	2 points
	I got 10/25, so I didn't do too badly. I'm not too surprised by anything on the list once I saw them, but I am shocked by some things that weren't. One that no one else has mentioned yet is "dark", which I was sure would be on there. Cliched opening line and all that.

	Rosco:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:29 GMT	7 points
	Why are possessive adjectives - his, hers, your - not included? When describing everyday objects, these are probably the adjectives I use the most. I am sure that these were excluded, and not just less frequent. At the very least, you should disclaim that possessive adjectives are not counted.

	Chris:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:45 GMT	2 points
	Good points Rosco... I'm also surprised that there's such a difference in percentages between adjectives like good-bad old-new first-last...

	Ryan:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 05:46 GMT	0 points
	I didn't think this was gonna be hard, but it really made me think. I hard time getting a lot of them/a lot of them came to me with a minute left.

	marpocky:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 06:02 GMT	0 points
	Did anyone else try Sporcly?

	Benjo211:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 06:16 GMT	15 points
	"able" is on this list. Surprising. Not common for me.

	Dodge:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 06:27 GMT	2 points
	These kinds of quizzes are very humbling. I remember the most used words quiz awhile back. You think you know your language pretty well until you can't think of half of the most common adjectives.

	Jordan117:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 06:41 GMT	2 points
	These types of quizzes are always really difficult, and it's always a crapshoot which ones you'll remember. For instance, I got "same" and "next", but missed "big" and "small". It also seems like the commonality of a word doesn't match up well to how often people remembered it. Go figure.

	CarmineClash:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 07:11 GMT	-3 points
	@Andy B: "Sporcly" would be an adverb.

	yankeessuck8991:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 07:24 GMT	7 points
	wtf, no "facetious"?

	debbiedoesnothin:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 08:54 GMT	-2 points
	I got 13 on the first try. Really hard.

	LaStic:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 08:57 GMT	-1 points
	Both big AND large? How odd

	SlovakOne:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 09:41 GMT	-1 points
	So hard. Only 9.

	SlovakOne:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 09:42 GMT	2 points
	jaspa: I would swear that I read davidr comment from few days ago.

	RavenEleni:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 10:39 GMT	0 points
	7/25 - well harder than i thought it would be. also confused as to why own is on the list? ah well. @yankeessuck8991: if it makes you feel anybetter, I use the word facetious everyday, lol.

	Tictac123:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:00 GMT	0 points
	I didn't even know words like 'same' were adjectives haha

	davidr:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:11 GMT	3 points
	@jaspa: waves I've been busy and away at a conference so not had much time for Sporcling. I have commented on a few quizzes.

	davidr:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:18 GMT	6 points
	@CarmineClash: Ending in -ly doesn't automatically make a word an adverb: consider, `sparkly' and `scholarly', for example. `Sporcly' seems much more like an adjective, to me, meaning `like Sporcle'. `I visited a sporcly website' seems to make much more sense than `I did it sporcly'.

	davidr:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:29 GMT	7 points
	I'm confused. Obviously, the bods at the OED know way more about linguistics than I do but is `few' really an adjective? It seems more like a determiner to me. For example, you can say `Few black cats do X' but not `Black few cats'. If it is an adjective, why aren't words like `some', `most' and `all' (and even `one' and `two') adjectives, too? All of those words appear in the 100 commonest words quiz, which means they're more common than `few', which doesn't. Can any linguists explain? Is it that `few' has a comparative and superlative, while the others I've listed don't? Is that enough to tip the balance?

	rahv:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 11:45 GMT	4 points
	@davidr: a quick google got me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_names which states that words like "first" are numerals. "few" would seem to fit into that category, too?! however, numerals might just be a subset of adjectives.

	Skydog:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 12:01 GMT	1 point
	If someone gets all of them, they used your link or went googling... This is difficult even Bill Gates would have trouble lol.

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	jesus:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 12:35 GMT	12 points
	@skydog: Why Bill Gates?

	LoveShack:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 13:42 GMT	-3 points
	aah i'm currently in 0.5% of people. that's nice

	Jack:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 14:07 GMT	-1 points
	Can we get one from Webster's dictionary? There is no way that these are the most common in America. If that was the case "like" would be numbers 1-10 haha.

	alicealice:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 14:17 GMT	0 points
	I got 23 just by looking around my study, describing everything (and I mean everything) that I saw, and then frantically typing in the billions of adjectives I came up with. Missed 'public', which is fair enough, and 'able' - wtf? Maybe I'm just being naive, but I can't remember the last time I, or anyone else I know, used 'able' as an adjective...

	Chiaprofessor:	Apr 14th, 2009 at 14:55 GMT	7 points
	@davidr: I'm not a linguist, but I've taught a few foreign languages. I'll try to help clear some things up. Numbers and colors are adjectives, and I am surprised that more of them didn't make the list. 'First', 'Last', etc. are ordinal numbers, i.e., they describe the order things are in. 'One', 'Two', etc. are cardinal or 'counting' numbers but still adjectives. However, I didn't like your example of 'Few black cats...' vs. 'Black few cats...' There are rules governing the order of adjectives and quantity tends to come before quality in English. I hope this helps, and I also hope I'm not way off, it's been awhile since I've taught this topic.