Every adjective is doing one of two jobs. When it sits inside the noun phrase, describing the noun directly — o casă mare ("a big house") — it is attributive. When it stands on the other side of a linking verb, predicated of the noun — Casa e mare ("The house is big") — it is predicative. English speakers know this split intuitively, but they carry one false assumption into Romanian: that the predicative adjective, sitting off on its own after "to be," somehow escapes agreement. It does not. Romanian adjectives agree in both positions. Fete frumoase and Fetele sunt frumoase show the identical feminine-plural ending. Agreement in Romanian is position-independent — and the page's real payoff is the handful of adjectives, led by gata ("ready"), that break this by being invariable.
Attributive: inside the noun phrase
An attributive adjective is part of the noun phrase. In Romanian it normally follows the noun and agrees with it in gender and number (see adjective position). It answers "which / what kind of?" — it helps pick out the noun.
o casă mare
a big house (attributive, feminine singular)
niște munți înalți
some tall mountains (attributive, masculine plural)
Am văzut un film foarte bun aseară.
I saw a really good film last night.
Here the adjective is welded to the noun: casă mare, munți înalți are units you could drop whole into any sentence. The adjective is not asserting anything by itself — it is restricting or coloring the noun.
Predicative: after a copula
A predicative adjective is the complement of a linking verb — most often a fi ("to be"), but also a deveni ("to become"), a părea ("to seem"), a rămâne ("to remain"), a se face ("to turn / become"). It is what the sentence asserts about the subject. And it agrees with that subject in exactly the same gender and number.
Casa e mare.
The house is big. (predicative — but still feminine singular: mare)
Munții sunt înalți.
The mountains are tall. (predicative, masculine plural înalți)
Ele sunt obosite după antrenament.
They (fem.) are tired after practice. (feminine plural obosite)
Copilul a devenit foarte timid de când s-a mutat.
The child has become very shy since he moved.
Compare the two jobs side by side and the constancy of agreement jumps out:
| Subject | Attributive | Predicative |
|---|---|---|
| fată (f.sg) | o fată frumoasă | Fata e frumoasă. |
| fete (f.pl) | niște fete frumoase | Fetele sunt frumoase. |
| băiat (m.sg) | un băiat înalt | Băiatul e înalt. |
| băieți (m.pl) | niște băieți înalți | Băieții sunt înalți. |
Why does Romanian insist on agreement even predicatively, when the adjective is sentences away from its noun? Because Romanian marks the relationship morphologically: the matching ending is the grammatical thread tying the adjective back to its subject. In a language with free-ish word order, that thread is what tells you which noun a far-flung adjective belongs to. English can drop agreement because rigid word order does the linking work instead.
Adjectives that prefer the predicate
Most adjectives are happy in either slot. A few are strongly or exclusively predicative — they naturally appear after a fi and resist sitting attributively in front of a noun. The two to know:
dator ("owing, indebted; obliged") agrees normally (dator, datoare, datori, datoare) and is overwhelmingly predicative:
Îți sunt dator cu o sută de lei.
I owe you a hundred lei. (predicative — dator agrees with the masculine subject)
Ne simțim datori să-i mulțumim.
We feel obliged to thank him.
You would say un om dator ("a man in debt") attributively, but the everyday home of dator is the predicate.
gata ("ready, finished") is the headline case — and it is special for a different reason: it does not agree at all.
The exceptions: invariable predicatives
A small set of adjectives are invariable — they have one frozen form for every gender and number. They still function as predicatives (and sometimes attributives), but they never take agreement endings. The most important is gata:
Sunt gata.
I'm ready. (masc. or fem. — gata never changes)
Ele sunt gata de plecare.
They (fem.) are ready to leave. (still gata, not *gate)
Băieții sunt gata, putem începe.
The boys are ready, we can start. (gata, invariable)
Gata stays gata across eu, ele, băieții — there is no gate, no gați. It descends from a Greek/Balkan adverbial and simply never joined the agreeing adjective class. The same invariability holds for a cluster of borrowed color adjectives that resist the Romanian ending system — bej ("beige"), gri ("grey"), roz ("pink"), maro ("brown"), bordo ("burgundy"), kaki:
o haină gri și niște pantofi gri
a grey coat and some grey shoes (gri is the same for both — invariable)
Pereții sunt bej, iar ușile sunt maro.
The walls are beige, and the doors are brown. (bej, maro — no agreement)
These are exactly the words where learners wrongly add an ending by analogy. There is no grie, no maroi; the loan stays put. Flag them, memorize the short list, and let everything else agree.
Same adjective, both jobs, identical ending
Because the ending tracks the noun rather than the slot, you can move an adjective from attributive to predicative and the ending does not budge:
florile roșii
the red flowers (attributive, feminine plural roșii)
Florile sunt roșii.
The flowers are red. (predicative — same ending, roșii)
This is the cleanest demonstration that Romanian agreement is one system, indifferent to whether the adjective is inside the phrase or across the copula.
Common Mistakes
The dominant English-transfer error is treating the predicative adjective as uninflected — leaving it in the masculine singular after "to be," as if English's invariable adjective carried over:
❌ Ele sunt obosit.
Incorrect — predicative adjectives agree: feminine plural is obosite.
✅ Ele sunt obosite.
They (fem.) are tired.
Don't conjure an ending for an invariable adjective like gata:
❌ Fetele sunt gate.
Incorrect — gata is invariable; it never takes a plural ending.
✅ Fetele sunt gata.
The girls are ready.
Don't invent agreement on a loan color:
❌ niște perdele maroi
Incorrect — maro is invariable: niște perdele maro.
✅ niște perdele maro
some brown curtains
Don't mismatch the predicative adjective with the subject's gender just because the adjective sits far from it:
❌ Casa pe care am cumpărat-o e mic.
Incorrect — the subject casa is feminine: e mică.
✅ Casa pe care am cumpărat-o e mică.
The house I bought is small.
Key Takeaways
- Attributive = inside the noun phrase (o casă mare); predicative = after a copula (Casa e mare).
- Romanian adjectives agree in both positions — agreement is position-independent and is dictated by the noun, not by the slot.
- A few adjectives like dator live mostly in the predicate but still agree normally.
- The true exceptions are invariable adjectives — gata and the loan colors gri, bej, roz, maro, bordo, kaki — which never agree in either position.
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Start learning Romanian→Related Topics
- Romanian Adjectives: An OverviewA1 — How Romanian adjectives agree with their noun in gender and number and normally follow it, with a preview of the four-form, three-form, two-form, and invariable classes.
- Four-Form Adjectives (bun, bună, buni, bune)A1 — The largest Romanian adjective class, with four distinct forms for masculine/feminine singular and plural, and the vowel and consonant alternations it shares with nouns.
- Adjective Position: Before or After the NounA2 — Why Romanian adjectives normally follow the noun, when they move in front for emphasis or emotion, and how fronting relocates the definite article onto the adjective.
- Copular Sentences (a fi + predicate)A1 — How to link a subject to a predicate with a fi (to be). Two facts run against English: a predicate profession or role takes NO article (Sunt student; Ea e medic — not 'un student'), and a predicate adjective AGREES with the subject (Casa e mare; Fetele sunt frumoase). Covers predicate nouns, adjectives, and adverbials, the present forms of a fi, and negation (nu e / nu sunt).
- Mistake: Adjective and Article AgreementA2 — English speakers leave adjectives frozen in the masculine-singular dictionary form (*o casă mic) and double-article fronted adjectives (*frumoasa fata). Two habits fix almost everything: always inflect the adjective to match its noun, and put the definite article on the FIRST element only.