A part of speech and a specialization of open-class word. This is the collection of all adjectives. An adjective is typically used as a noun modifier to denote a quality of the thing denoted by the noun phrase as a whole (as 'red' in 'the red shoes'). Many adjectives can be used either attributively (as in the foregoing example) or predicatively (as in 'the shoes are red'). Many adjectives have comparative and superlative forms (e.g. 'dark'/'darker'/'darkest').