Adjective agreement

Adjective agreement is the rule that a Latin adjective must match the noun it describes in three ways at once: gender, number, and case. Getting this right lets you link a description to the correct noun even when they sit far apart in the sentence.

English adjectives never change: "good" is "good" whether the noun is one boy, many girls, or a subject or object. Latin instead re-shapes the adjective's ending to echo its noun, so agreement, not position, tells you what goes with what.

	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter
Nom. sing.	bonus	bona	bonum
Acc. sing.	bonum	bonam	bonum
Nom. plural	bonī	bonae	bona

Examples:

• servus bonus - a good slave (both masc. nom. sing.)
• puellam bonam videt - he sees the good girl (both fem. acc. sing.)
• rēgēs bonī - good kings (both masc. nom. plural)

Two things trip up English speakers. First, do not expect the adjective and noun to share identical letters: rēx bonus is correct because both are masculine nominative singular, even though the endings look different. Agreement is about the three categories, not matching spelling. Second, when an adjective is separated from its noun, use the shared gender-number-case to reunite them rather than assuming the nearest word.