   in linguistics, an adjective is a "describing word", the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified. adjectives are one of the traditional eight english parts of speech, although linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that formerly were considered to be adjectives. in the immediately previous sentence, "traditional" is an adjective and "eight", while known traditionally as an adjective, is now classified as a determiner; and in the preceding paragraph, both "main" and "syntactic" are traditional adjectives. ==distribution== most, but not all, languages have adjectives. those that lack them typically use words of another part of speech, often adverbs, which is a describing word for a person, place or thing. to serve the same semantics semantic function; an example, such a language might have a verb that means "to be big", and would use as attributive verb construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what english expresses as "big house". even in languages that do have adjectives, one language's adjective might not be another's; for example, whereas english uses "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), dutch and french use "honger hebben" and "avoir faim," respectively (literally "to have hunger", hunger being a noun), and whereas hebrew uses the adjective "××§××§" (zaqÅ«q, roughly "in need of"), english uses the verb "to need". adjectives form an open class of words in most languages that have them; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, however, and new adjectives are not easily derived. similarly, native japanese adjectives (i-adjectives) are a closed class (as are native verbs), although nouns (which are open class) may be used in the genitive and there is the separate class of adjectival nouns (na-adjectives), which is also open, and 
Parts_of_speech