Big red bus? or Red big bus?

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

The commas should guide you – very useful things commas!

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.

no wonder foreigners struggle to learn English!

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 !

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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......

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!

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

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!

I didn't realise there was a set way.

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.

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.

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.

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!