Adjective Agreement: The Basics

In English an adjective is frozen: a new house, a new car, new books — "new" never changes. In Russian an adjective is a chameleon. It agrees with the noun it describes in three things at once: gender, number, and case. That means "new" has not one form but a whole family of them — но́вый, но́вая, но́вое, но́вые — and you pick the right one to match the noun. This page covers the most important slice for a beginner: the nominative endings (the dictionary form, used for subjects and "X is Y" sentences) across the three genders and the plural. We'll also flag, briefly, that adjectives change for case too — the full case declension and the hard/soft-stem split come on later pages.

The nominative endings

In the nominative, an adjective takes one of four ending-sets depending on the noun's gender (in the singular) or simply on whether the noun is plural:

A few things to notice immediately. The masculine has three possible endings — -ый, -ий, and -ой — and which one a given adjective uses depends on its stem and where the stress falls (that's the hard/soft and stressed-ending story of the next page). The feminine, neuter, and plural each have two variants — a "hard" one (-ая, -ое, -ые) and a "soft" one (-яя, -ее, -ие) — and again the choice is driven by the stem. But the logic is constant: one ending per gender/number slot, and you must fill the slot.

Agreement in action

The core skill is matching: identify the noun's gender (or notice it's plural), then attach the right adjective ending. Here is "new" matching four different nouns:

Notice in the third example that every adjective in front of the noun agrees: both большо́е and но́вое take the neuter ending, because both describe окно́. If you stack adjectives, they all match the noun.

"X is Y" sentences

Russian normally has no present-tense "to be," so a noun plus an adjective is already a full sentence — and the adjective still agrees:

The endings don't change just because the adjective comes after the noun as a predicate ("the soup is tasty"): agreement is about the noun, not the position.

Adjectives change for case too

The nominative is just the starting point. Because Russian nouns move through six cases, the adjective in front of them moves with them. When дом ("house") becomes в до́ме ("in the house," prepositional), the adjective но́вый becomes но́вом to match:

You don't need to master all six cases yet — that's a separate topic — but it's important to grasp the principle now: the adjective and its noun travel together through the cases, both changing ending. The prepositional endings you just saw are detailed on the prepositional forms page.

Word order: adjective before noun

Here Russian behaves like English: the descriptive adjective normally comes before the noun — но́вый дом ("a/the new house"), интере́сная кни́га ("an interesting book"). This is the neutral order. (Putting the adjective after the noun is possible but marked — it sounds poetic or emphatic, e.g. in titles or set phrases.) So unlike French or Spanish, you don't have to relearn placement; just remember to make the adjective agree.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Russian adjectives agree with their noun in gender, number, and case — there's no frozen "default" form.
• Nominative endings: masculine -ый/-ий/-ой (но́вый, ма́ленький, большо́й), feminine -ая/-яя (но́вая, после́дняя), neuter -ое/-ее (но́вое, после́днее), plural -ые/-ие (но́вые) for all genders.
• The plural ending ignores gender — но́вые столы́ / маши́ны / о́кна all use но́вые.
• Agreement holds in predicate position too: суп вку́сный, пого́да хоро́шая.
• Adjectives change for case alongside their noun (в но́вом до́ме); the full case declension is a later topic.
• Adjectives normally come before the noun, just as in English.
• The choice between the -ый/-ий/-ой masculine endings (and the hard vs soft variants) is explained on hard-stem and soft-stem adjectives.