Dutch lets an adjective do a noun's job without adding any noun. De zieke — literally "the sick (one)" — simply means the patient. Het mooie ervan means the beautiful part of it. And after the little words iets, niets, wat, and veel, the adjective grows a tail you will not see coming: iets moois, niets nieuws. This page covers all three of these patterns — people, abstract qualities, and the iets-construction — and singles out that last -s for the drilling it deserves, because it is an obligatory ending English gives you no reason to expect. (This is specifically about adjectives turning into nouns; for nominalisation in general — infinitives as nouns, the het-rule for naming actions — see Nominalisation.)
Adjectives as people: de zieke, een bekende
When an adjective refers to a person who has that quality, you keep the inflected adjective and drop the noun. The adjective behaves like a de-word noun: it takes -e in the singular, an -n in the plural, and pluralises like a regular noun.
De zieke moest meteen naar het ziekenhuis.
The sick one / the patient had to go to hospital right away. — 'zieke' alone = the sick person.
Een onbekende belde gisteravond aan.
A stranger rang the doorbell last night. — onbekend → een onbekende = an unknown person.
Ze is een goede bekende van mij.
She's a good acquaintance of mine. — bekende = a person one knows, an acquaintance.
The key point that trips English speakers: these nominalised people-adjectives still inflect. They are not frozen labels; they are adjectives wearing a noun's hat, so the -e rule from The -e Rule is fully in force. In the plural, they take -n and carry a plural meaning — a whole class of people.
De armen en de rijken leven in totaal verschillende werelden.
The poor and the rich live in completely different worlds. — arm → de armen, rijk → de rijken.
De jongeren van nu groeien op met sociale media.
Young people today grow up with social media. — jong → de jongeren (a standard word for 'youth/young people').
De gewonden werden naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.
The injured were taken to hospital. — gewond (injured) → de gewonden.
A handful of these have become fully lexicalised — de jongere (young person), de bekende (acquaintance), de gelovige (believer), de werkloze (unemployed person) — and you'll meet them in the dictionary as nouns. But the pattern is productive: you can nominalise almost any people-describing adjective on the fly, and a Dutch speaker will understand it.
Adjectives as abstract qualities: het mooie, het goede
Put het in front of an inflected adjective and you name the abstract quality itself — "the beautiful thing about it," "the good (as a concept)." This is the het + adjective + -e pattern, and it always takes -e because het makes it definite.
Het mooie van deze stad is dat alles dichtbij is.
The lovely thing about this city is that everything is close by. — het mooie = the beautiful part/aspect.
Het goede en het kwade strijden in elk verhaal.
Good and evil struggle in every story. — abstract nouns from the adjectives goed and kwaad. (literary)
Het beste ervan is dat het helemaal gratis is.
The best part of it is that it's completely free. — het beste (superlative) ervan = the best thing about it.
The phrase het ... ervan ("the ... part of it / about it") is the workhorse here and worth memorising as a unit: het mooie ervan, het vervelende ervan, het rare ervan — "the beautiful / annoying / strange thing about it." Note that het beste ervan uses a superlative nominalised the same way; the construction takes comparatives and superlatives just as happily as plain adjectives.
Het vervelende ervan is dat je het pas later merkt.
The annoying thing about it is that you only notice later.
The -s relic: iets moois, niets nieuws, wat lekkers
Here is the pattern no English speaker invents on their own. After the indefinite quantity words iets (something), niets (nothing), wat (something, colloquial), veel (much, a lot), and weinig (little), a following adjective takes an obligatory -s:
| Trigger |
| Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| iets | iets moois | something beautiful |
| niets | niets nieuws | nothing new |
| wat | wat lekkers | something tasty |
| iets | iets interessants | something interesting |
| veel | veel moois | a lot of beauty / many fine things |
| niets | niets bijzonders | nothing special |
Ik wil iets moois kopen voor haar verjaardag.
I want to buy something nice for her birthday. — iets + mooi + s = iets moois.
Er is niets nieuws onder de zon.
There's nothing new under the sun. — niets + nieuw + s = niets nieuws. (set phrase)
Zullen we wat lekkers halen voor onderweg?
Shall we grab something tasty for the road? — wat + lekker + s = wat lekkers. (informal)
Op het nieuws was niets bijzonders te zien.
There was nothing special to see on the news. — niets bijzonders.
Why the -s? It is a fossilised partitive genitive — the same "something of good" logic German still spells out (etwas Gutes) and that English shows in archaic "nothing of the sort." The -s is the worn-down remnant of an old genitive ending meaning roughly "of [the quality]." You do not need the history to use it, but it explains why the ending appears precisely after quantity words: iets, niets, veel, weinig are all asking "how much of something," and the genitive -s answers "of the good / new / tasty."
Two spelling and form notes. First, the -s is glued straight on — no apostrophe: iets moois, never iets mooi's. Second, adjectives that already end in a sibilant or that would clash sometimes resist the ending (you'll hear iets fris rather than a doubled-up form), but for the overwhelming majority of adjectives the rule is clean: add -s. And the spelling adjustments you know still apply underneath — nieuw → nieuws keeps the w; mooi → moois just adds the s; vies → vies + s would clash, so it stays iets vies.
A three-way contrast to keep them apart
The same adjective can appear in all three guises, so it pays to see them side by side:
De zieke slaapt. / Het zieke eraan is de eenzaamheid. / Er is niets ziekers dan eenzaamheid.
The sick one is asleep. / The sick thing about it is the loneliness. / There's nothing more sickening than loneliness. — person (de zieke), abstract quality (het zieke), iets/niets + adjective + s (niets ziekers).
Read off the three patterns: de/een + inflected adjective = a person; het + adjective + -e = an abstract quality; iets/niets/wat/veel + adjective + -s = an indefinite amount of a quality. Each has its own ending, and the endings are not interchangeable.
Common Mistakes
Almost every error here is either a dropped -s after iets/niets or a failure to inflect a people-adjective — both because English nominalises adjectives with no ending at all ("the rich," "something new").
❌ Ik heb iets nieuw gekocht.
Incorrect — after iets, the adjective must take -s: iets nieuws. The bare form is the classic English-speaker error.
✅ Ik heb iets nieuws gekocht.
I bought something new.
❌ Er is niets bijzonder gebeurd.
Incorrect — niets also triggers the -s: niets bijzonders. (Note: here it's adverbial-feeling but the -s is still required.)
✅ Er is niets bijzonders gebeurd.
Nothing special happened.
❌ De ziek moest naar het ziekenhuis.
Incorrect — a nominalised people-adjective still inflects: de zieke, not de ziek.
✅ De zieke moest naar het ziekenhuis.
The patient had to go to hospital.
❌ De arm en de rijk leven verschillend.
Incorrect — plural nominalised adjectives take -en: de armen en de rijken.
✅ De armen en de rijken leven verschillend.
The poor and the rich live differently.
❌ iets mooi's, niets nieuw's
Incorrect — the -s is added with no apostrophe: iets moois, niets nieuws.
✅ iets moois, niets nieuws
something beautiful, nothing new.
Key Takeaways
- Person: a de/een
- inflected adjective stands for a person — de zieke (the patient), een onbekende (a stranger); plural takes -n — de armen, de jongeren.
- These people-adjectives still inflect — they are not frozen nouns.
- Abstract quality: het
- adjective + -e names the quality — het mooie ervan, het goede en het kwade, het beste ervan (superlatives work too).
- Indefinite amount: after iets, niets, wat, veel, weinig, the adjective takes an obligatory -s — iets moois, niets nieuws, wat lekkers, niets bijzonders.
- That -s is a frozen partitive genitive ("something of beautiful"); it has no apostrophe and English gives no cue for it — drill the chunks.
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Start learning Dutch→Related Topics
- Turning Words into Nouns (Nominalization)B2 — Dutch turns verbs and adjectives into nouns by reliable routes, each with a fixed gender: the nominalised infinitive (always het — het roken, het zwemmen), the -ing deverbal (always de — de opening), the -heid abstract (always de — de schoonheid), and the adjective-as-noun for people and concepts (de zieke, het goede).
- The -e Rule and Its One Big ExceptionA1 — Before a noun, a Dutch adjective takes -e — always — with exactly one exception: a singular het-word introduced by een or no article keeps the adjective bare (een mooi huis). Master that one cell and the whole rule is yours.
- Participles as AdjectivesB2 — How Dutch past participles (de gesloten deur, een gebroken been) and present participles in -end (de slapende baby, een huilend kind) work as attributive adjectives — and how the ordinary -e rule governs both.
- Adjectives: OverviewA1 — Dutch adjectives have essentially one ending — the -e you add before a noun — plus a single famous exception (a het-word with een or no article stays bare), while predicate adjectives never change at all. Comparison adds -er and -st. After German's case-driven endings, this is a relief.
- De-words and Het-words: Noun GenderA1 — Dutch has a two-way gender system: common-gender de-words (about two-thirds of nouns, from the merged old masculine and feminine) and neuter het-words (a closed-ish minority worth memorising). Gender fixes the article, both demonstratives, the relative pronoun and the adjective ending — and the plural article is always de.