Big red bus? or Red big bus?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary

Oh, and grandMattie, one of my colleagues once told me I’d always been a bit of a pendant!

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/201711/medium-183827-16f5d554-3839-4880-8ae5-2b17a4c0bf5b.jpeg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/201711/medium-32070-6d0966fd-be02-4776-beee-1fd12aef72cf.gif

We most of us do it automatically and it is usually when the order is wrong that a non native speaker slips up. Of course the order can be changed for emphasis if for instance there were several “big buses” of different colours you might specify the colour.
I believe the accepted order is as given here.

Thank you!
In French, colour goes after the noun and as it is my other first language, I used to find it very confusing as a child.

Also in German, the order of words in a sentence is very strict, well it was when I did O and A level German. It had to be ' time, manner, place'. Meaning when, how and where in that order.

I didn't realise there was a set way.

Nor did I vampire queen until a year or two ago when a friend who teaches English as a foreign language told me. I think it's fascinating - we all get it right without realising but its difficult for foreigners! We would never say little naughty boy for example. I like the example of large brown leather walking boots. Leather large walking brown boots sounds ridiculous!

If you say the sentence out loud, you can tell which order the words go in, it just sounds right.?

I guess I'm just plain lazy in that I word use according to some sort of flow. Whatever comes out naturally, is not blatantly ungrammatical and conveys the intended message does me. Whew!

Ah ...think bicycle and is it old or does it belong to a lady who is old or is it even and old lady's old bicycle......

Do you have a link for those tables MawBroon that I could possibly print out? My 9 year old DGD sometimes gets herself into a muddle with the order of adjectives. This looks very helpful.

Well thats the point really, lemongrove & kim- native speakers do it naturally without knowing there are any rules!

As for old lady's bicycle vs lady's old bicycle I've seen the same problem with men's black shoes advertised as black men's shoes! Changes the meaning completely!

The British Council has lots of online help for people learning English, including a fun children's section (and another one for teenagers): learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en. But my favourite is en.oxforddictionaries.com, which is easy to navigate and gives many more examples of usage than other dictionaries.

The general rule is that adjectives like old, young, little, big, grand, horrible, dreadful, nice come first, whereas names of colours come second, as in the example big red bus.

But then what do we do with a sentence like, He was scared by a dreadful big dog? Here I think the idea is that the most important thing you want to tell about the dog comes first: it was a dreadful big dog, not a nice big dog.

But its not quite as simple as thet. Where would you put 'hairy' in that sentence ? I think it wounds right after big And the colour ie dreadful big brown hairy dog.
Its vey complicated !

no wonder foreigners struggle to learn English!

As a teacher in a school with large numbers of English as an additional language learners, I have spent many happy hours teaching this. It's something we acquire automatically learning English from birth but it has to be taught explicitly to EAL learners. I have found and copied the document I refer to. Adjectives of colour, origin, material and purpose usually go in that order,
Other adjectives usually go before words of colour, origin, material and
purpose. It is impossible to give exact rules, but adjectives of size, length
and height often come first.
Adjectives that express judgements or attitudes usually come before all others.
Numbers usually go before size adjectives.
First, next and last most often go before one, two, three, etc.
Age would normally go after adjectives of size, length and height, but before colour, origin, material and purpose.
Thus, a complete list could be:
(article) + number + judgement/attitude + size, length, height + age + colour
Don't mean to bore people but this has been of great interest to me.

The commas should guide you – very useful things commas!

Golly! Even more complicated than I thought! But very interesting!

It’s the dog that is dreadful, so it would be ‘he was scared by
A big dreadful dog’....well, sounds right to me.

As a teacher of English as a second language I have to say that teaching word order is one of my favourite lessons.

Well done all of you, and thank you!
What about the hyphen? DH's favourite example is "extra marital sex is a good thing". If the hyphen is between extra and marital...

I often have trouble with the placement of adverbs, (i.e. walked quickly towards the aisle...or quickly walked towards the aisle... or walked towards the aisle, quickly).

Does it make any difference where they go or is there a hard and fast rule that governs the placement of adverbs?

No idea - but the first phrase seems to indicate haste; the second a habitual mode of movement and the third seems a bit clunky.