Chicago Style Workout 54: Adjectives

Describe Your Favorite Part of Speech

This month’s quiz focuses on adjectives, which are covered in CMOS paragraphs 5.68–96. Adjectives are words that describe things, like the word “favorite” in the heading above. To learn more about this descriptive part of speech, take the quiz.

(The articles a, an, and the, which are included as a special category of adjectives in chapter 5, are the subject of an earlier quiz.)

Subscribers to The Chicago Manual of Style Online may click through to the linked sections of the Manual (cited in the answers). (For a 30-day free trial of CMOS Online, click here.)

Note: Style guides and dictionaries sometimes disagree. This quiz is designed to test your knowledge of The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition.

Chicago Style Workout 54: Adjectives

1. Most adjectives derive from
2. The number three in the phrase “three pigs” functions as
3. In “a New York minute” and “a Cuban cigar,” New York and Cuban are functioning as
4. An adjective that precedes the noun it modifies (e.g., perfect in “perfect storm”) is called
5. An adjective that follows the noun it modifies (e.g., public in “notary public”) is called
6. An adjective that modifies a pronoun usually follows the pronoun.
7. An adjective that follows a linking verb and modifies the subject of a sentence (e.g., delicious in “this tastes delicious”) is called
8. An adjective that modifies something without reference to any other thing is called
9. The phrase “a more perfect union” breaks a rule against modifying what type of adjective?
10. In the phrase “wrinkled canvas jacket,” wrinkled and canvas are coordinate adjectives.

 

Top photo: Three Piggy Banks on a Beach, by kstudio.

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