Plural colors and traits (فُعْل)

The Plural Pattern for Colors and Traits

In the previous lesson, you learned that colors and certain physical traits use the أفعل and فعلاء patterns for their singular masculine and feminine forms. When describing plural nouns, these adjectives share a single, unified broken plural pattern: فُعْل.

Instead of adding standard plural suffixes, you form the plural by applying the root letters to this pattern. Both masculine and feminine plural nouns use this exact same adjective form.

Let's look at how these plural traits are used to describe groups of people:

When an adjective is the predicate of the sentence (as in "the players will be dark-skinned"), its case ending changes depending on the grammar of the sentence. Notice how the plural adjective takes an accusative ending (ا) after words like كان or سوف يكون.

Plural Colors for Body Parts

The فُعْل pattern is also used for all the basic colors you learned previously:

Note: "White" becomes بيض rather than "بُيض" simply to make pronunciation easier, but it functions exactly the same way.

You will often see these plural colors used to describe plural nouns, particularly body parts like "eyes" (عيون) or "faces" (وجوه). While non-human plurals often take feminine singular adjectives, plural body parts frequently use these broken plural adjectives instead.

Again, these plural adjectives will take the appropriate case endings when the grammar requires it.