Superlative Adjective

Most of us who have some basic knowledge and understanding of English language are familiar with the term adjective. If not, we still use them in our everyday life but might not know what they are called exactly.

Today, I will discuss about the grammatical term adjective and its superlative degree. I will throw light on how a simple adjective is different from the superlative form and explain with the help of examples.

Adjective

The term adjective is used to refer to words in a sentence that describe the quality of the noun. In other terms, adjectives add more meaning to nouns.

Example:

She ate a red apple.

The detailed essay covered all aspects.

In the above two examples, the words red and detailed add more information to the nouns apple and essay respectively hence they are termed as adjectives.

Superlative Adjective

Now adjectives may also be used to compare two or more nouns in a sentence. When three or more things or nouns are compared, the adjectives used are superlative.

Example:

She ate a biggest apple from the tree.

In the above example, the word biggest is the adjective that is used to describe the noun apple. Now in this example, the adjective not only describes the noun but also compares it with other nouns i.e. the apples on the tree, thus it is known as superlative adjective.

Note that a simple adjective big can be used as a superlative adjective by adding the suffix –est at the end.

Other examples include closest, largest, strangest, wisest, thinnest, fastest, greatest etc.

Example:

I am most comfortable in this seat.

Now consider the above example. This sentence also contains a superlative objective but that is not in the form of adding –est at the end of a word but adding most before it. The term most comfortable shows that the speaker is comparing three or more seats and finds one most comfortable among them, hence superlative adjective is used.

So another way of making an adjective superlative is by adding more at the beginning of it. Other examples include most serene, most hesitant, most expensive, most dangerous etc.