Adjectives by Letter, A to Z

What is on this list?

This hub links to 26 pages, one for each letter, together holding 5,073 common English adjectives with a short definition on each. It exists for anyone searching for adjectives that start with a particular letter, or more broadly for descriptive words to describe someone or something, and it works as a reference rather than a puzzle-solving tool: browse a letter, search within it, or jump straight to the one you need from the list below.

The words come from a single dataset built the same way for every letter, so the card format on the A page is exactly what you will find on Z: the word, its definition, nothing more. The letters are not evenly sized — S holds nearly six hundred and X holds seven — and that unevenness is real rather than padded. If adjectives are not what brought you here, the same letter-by-letter format runs for animals and foods.

How this list was built

1. Sourced from Princeton WordNet 3.1. Every adjective across all 26 pages comes from WordNet, a lexical database built by linguists at Princeton University rather than scraped from the web. WordNet holds 21,499 adjective entries, of which 20,706 are single alphabetic words once hyphenated numerals and multi-word phrases are set aside.
2. Filtered by WordNet's own frequency signal. Each entry records how many of its senses were observed in WordNet's semantic concordance, a hand-tagged body of text. Keeping only adjectives with at least one observed sense cuts those 20,706 entries to 5,085 across the whole alphabet, removing the long tail of technical and rare terms while keeping the words people actually use.
3. Numbers removed, definitions taken from WordNet's glosses. WordNet classes cardinal numbers and Roman numerals as adjectives, which is correct lexicography and useless here, so those were dropped by their definition rather than their spelling — a spelling rule for Roman numerals also matches ordinary words like “civil” and “mild”. Each remaining card carries WordNet's own gloss for the word's first and most common sense, trimmed to the definition.

What is missing, and why

WordNet counts participles as adjectives, so words like abandoned and aching sit next to more classic descriptive words throughout the set; they do function as adjectives, but a reader expecting only the traditional kind will notice. Multi-word adjectives such as well-known and run-of-the-mill exist in WordNet but are excluded everywhere here, because this format only covers single words.

The frequency filter is corpus-based rather than web-based, drawn from text tagged decades ago, so a few adjectives common online today are missing and a few dated ones remain. WordNet is also American English, so British spellings can be absent, and only base forms are included, with no comparatives or superlatives. Two letters are the clearest exception to how this set was built: X has no adjectives left once the frequency filter is applied, and Z has only two, so both pages were topped up with lower-frequency entries that are marked rather than presented as if they cleared the same bar.

Why is it free?

Every one of these 26 pages is static: nothing you type is uploaded anywhere, there is no account to create, and none of it sits behind a paywall or a watermark. It is a permissively licensed dataset rendered as a web page, so it costs nothing to host and nothing to use.