Strong adjectives and intensifiers

On this page, we will look at strong adjectives and intensifiers. At a basic level, we use words like very, really or extremely can be used to make adjectives stronger. These are called intensifiers. Let’s start by looking at a table:

Using repeated intensifiers is acceptable in informal conversations, but not in writing or in formal situations. To make the sentence even stronger, we need to use different adjectives that are more extreme (known as ‘strong adjectives‘).

Here are some examples of basic and strong adjectives

Now we can add another row to our table using strong adjectives.

From this point, we can continue making our sentence even more extreme, but we generally don’t use strong adjectives with basic intensifiers. For example, this sentence is not correct:

That’s a very fascinating story.

To make sentences with strong adjectives more extreme, we now need to use an extreme intensifier. Here’s a list of the most common extreme intensifiers.

• absolutely
• extremely
• exceptionally
• incredibly
• totally
• completely
• utterly

Now we can add the final row to the table, where a strong adjective is used with an extreme intensifier.