Collective Adjectives

A collective adjective is a special kind of Nominal Adjective that uses a descriptive word to name an entire group of people who share a defining trait. The pattern is always the same: place the in front of an adjective, and that adjective becomes a plural noun phrase referring to everyone in that category. The rich, the poor, the blind, the elderly, the unemployed—in each case the phrase means "all people who are X."

Three firm rules govern collective adjectives. First, they must always be preceded by the. Second, they are always treated as plural in subject–verb agreement: The rich are getting richer (not The rich is getting richer). Third, you never add a plural -s or -es—the poors is ungrammatical. These rules make collective adjectives simple to use once you internalise them.

Nationality adjectives also form collective groups: the French, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Irish. With nationalities ending in -ese or -ish, this collective form is particularly important because English lacks a separate singular noun for an individual: you cannot say a Chinese as a standalone noun in natural English—you would say a Chinese person or a Chinese citizen. The collective the Chinese neatly solves this gap when you want to refer to the nationality as a whole.

It is worth distinguishing collective adjectives from collective nouns like family, team, or government. Collective nouns are inherently nouns and can be treated as singular (the team is ready) or plural depending on dialect. Collective adjectives, by contrast, start life as adjectives and only take on nominal function through the the + adjective construction—and they are always firmly plural. For the broader category of adjectives acting as nouns, see Nominal Adjectives.