Spanish Adjectives: Agreement, Gender and Where They Go

English adjectives never change: a red car, red cars, a red house. Spanish adjectives do change — they agree with the noun in gender and number, and they usually sit after it. Once those two ideas click, adjectives stop being scary.

The short version: the adjective copies the noun's gender and number (un coche rojo, una casa roja, unos coches rojos), and it normally goes after the noun, not before it.

Agreement: match the noun

Most adjectives end in -o for masculine and switch to -a for feminine, then add -s for plural:

Adjectives ending in -e or a consonant don't change for gender — only for number: un libro grande, una casa grande, unos libros grandes. Same with azul → azules, fácil → fáciles.

Position: usually after the noun

The default is noun + adjective: una película interesante (an interesting film), un problema difícil (a difficult problem). This feels backwards to English speakers at first, but it's the norm.

A few very common adjectives can go before the noun and shorten: bueno → buen (un buen amigo), grande → gran (una gran ciudad — a great city, not a big one — position can change the meaning too).

Common mistakes

Forgetting to make it plural: it's los coches rojos, not los coches rojo.
Mismatching gender: una casa blanco should be blanca.
Putting it before out of English habit: rojo coche → coche rojo.

Agreement shows up everywhere — including with articles, so it pairs naturally with Spanish articles (el, la, un, una). And to describe things at all you'll lean on the core vocabulary in the 100 most common words.