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Comment by mtndew4brkfst | Hacker News Reader

In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble that clause in the same order as each other without really being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people just explain it as basically due to vibes. It was definitely not anything I remember from my public school education growing up.

If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.

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It's not really a hard and fast rule, but certain classes of deviation from it will certainly sound off. I don't think it's commonly explicitly taught to native speakers (at least I've never heard of it being taught in schools here) but it is, as I understand it, commonly taught to people learning English as a second language. https://icaltefl.com/adjective-order/

Big shiny square metal block doesn’t look so bad to me, but big shiny heavy square metal block does. Perhaps big it is the switch back and forth… big and heavy are fuzzily size-like characteristics while shiny is not…

Is a big shiny square metal block the same thing as a big square shiny metal block? I’m not sure. I think the former is a big square metal block which happens to also be shiny, while the latter is a big square block made of a shiny type of metal.

Does that make any sense at all?

I love the examples in your second paragraph - that helps make the point that they're not entirely commutative. Still, I couldn't write a nice generalizable rule on why I do agree with your breakdown of these examples.

It is funny that shininess is a characteristic that can be attributed to the block, or the metal that makes up the block, despite the block being made of the metal!

Linguists apparently have characterized this phenomenon and call it the “Royal Order of Adjectives” [0]:

1. Quantity or number (e.g., “two”)

2. Quality or opinion (e.g., “lovely”)

3. Size (e.g., “big”)

4. Age (e.g., “old”)

5. Shape (e.g., “round”)

6. Color (e.g., “red”)

7. Origin (e.g., “French”)

8. Material (e.g., “wooden”)

9. Purpose (e.g., “sleeping” in “sleeping bag”)

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/

The exceptions to this are also interesting to see. For example, “stainless-steel hex nut” or “designer little black dress” both violate the standard ordering, which would predict “hex stainless-steel nut” and “little black designer dress”.

These exceptions tend to arise with stock phrases such as “hex nut” or “little black dress”. In that case the entire phrase, including adjectives, is treated as the noun, with additional adjectives prepended.

Well, this is because a hex nut has a purpose and it is for you to hex your lost 10mm wrench.

I would have thought that little black designer dress was correct. Designer little black dress feels incorrect. The L and BL in Little and black and then the Ds in designer and dress also lend an alliterative flow to “little black designer dress” that is not there for “designer little black dress”

I think the dress example is not super great because “little black dress” is an expression or something. It is like an accessible and inexpensive but still nice and fashionable dress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_black_dress

So I think a little black designer dress would be a designer dress which happened to be little and black. A designer little black dress would be a dress of the “little black dress,” variety, which also has the trait “designer” applied.

The adjective order thing is a bit overwrought—the basic ordering rule is "more essential qualities bind closer to head". That's not a comprehensive rule, and to the extent how saliently essential qualities should be considered is vibes-based and not culturally universal, but it does quite well at explaining some apparent exceptions ("Chinese green tea" > ?"green Chinese tea") and implications of violating the "rule".

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