Adjective Agreement

In English an adjective is a frozen word: good is good whether it sits before a man, a woman, children, or to the woman — it never changes shape. Croatian adjectives do the opposite. Every adjective bends to match its noun in gender, number, and case all at once, so the single English word good corresponds to dozens of Croatian forms. This is the foundation of the entire adjective system, and once you grasp the logic — the adjective copies the noun's grammatical features — every later table becomes predictable rather than arbitrary.

The core rule: three things must match

An adjective and its noun form a unit, and the adjective must echo three properties of that noun:

1. Gender — masculine, feminine, or neuter
2. Number — singular or plural
3. Case — nominative, accusative, genitive, and so on

Get any one of them wrong and the phrase is ungrammatical. The practical consequence is that you cannot choose an adjective ending until you have already decided what the whole noun phrase is doing in the sentence — its gender (fixed by the noun), its number, and the case the sentence assigns it.

The nominative singular triplet

Start with the simplest situation: an adjective sitting before a noun, in the nominative singular (the dictionary form). The ending depends purely on the noun's gender.

The feminine -a and neuter -o will look familiar — they echo the noun endings themselves (žena, vino). That is not a coincidence: the adjective is literally harmonising its shape with the noun's. The masculine is the odd one, because it has two nominative forms — bare dobar and dobri — a distinction (indefinite vs definite) important enough to get its own page. For now, treat the bare form as your default masculine.

Plural agreement

When the noun goes plural, the adjective follows it there too, with its own set of plural endings — again one per gender.

Note the small trap in the neuter plural: it ends in -a (dobra djeca), exactly like the feminine singular (dobra žena). The same string dobra therefore means "good (fem. sg.)" in one phrase and "good (neut. pl.)" in another — the noun tells them apart. Djeca ("children") is a useful word to fix this on, because it is grammatically a neuter singular collective that triggers neuter-plural-style agreement.

Agreement holds as the case changes

Here is the part that makes Croatian adjectives genuinely demanding. Agreement is not just for the dictionary form — the adjective tracks the noun through every case. When the noun changes case, the adjective changes with it, in lockstep.

Compare dobar čovjek (nom.) with dobrog čovjeka (acc.): both the noun and its adjective moved. The adjective did not just gain a new ending on its own — it was dragged into the accusative because the noun was. This is the heart of the system: the case belongs to the whole phrase, and the adjective is one of its carriers. The complete set of these endings is laid out on the hard-stem declension page.

Every modifier agrees — and the phrase moves as a block

If a noun carries several modifiers — adjectives, demonstratives, possessives, numerals — all of them agree with it, simultaneously, in gender, number, and case. They are not optional decorations; each one wears the same grammatical uniform.

Because every modifier carries the same gender-number-case stamp, the whole noun phrase behaves as a single block. When you move it for emphasis or word order, the adjectives travel with the noun, still agreeing — Croatian never strands an adjective behind. The companion principle for the entire grammar is on the agreement principle page, and the internal ordering of these modifiers is covered under adjective and noun-phrase order.

Predicate adjectives agree too

Even when the adjective is not glued in front of the noun but sits after biti ("to be") as a predicate, it still agrees in gender and number with the subject.

So agreement is not a quirk of word order — it is a relationship between the adjective and the noun it describes, wherever that noun happens to be in the sentence.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• A Croatian adjective agrees with its noun in gender, number, and case — all three, all at once.
• Nominative singular triplet: masculine bare form (dobar), feminine -a (dobra), neuter -o/-e (dobro).
• Plural: masculine -i (dobri), feminine -e (dobre), neuter -a (dobra).
• Agreement is live across the whole declension: change the noun's case and the adjective changes too (dobar čovjek → dobrog čovjeka).
• Every prenominal modifier agrees, and the noun phrase moves as a unit. Predicate adjectives after biti agree as well.
• Decide the noun's gender, number, and case before choosing the adjective ending.