Adjectives have a customary order

Chart by Michelle Henry

It's an amazingly complex system and it works like this:

Number pronouns come before articles, as in:
     A few of the children in the park were playing ball.

Adjectives of opinion precede general adjectives. We might say "a corrupt political appointee," but never "a political corrupt appointee."

(However, we could say "a politically corrupt appointee," in which case the adverb 'politically' modifies the adjective 'corrupt,' rather than modifying the noun 'appointee.')

Opinion adjectives precede general, size, shape, origin, and material adjectives, so we might say:
      "a beautiful little antique Ming vase."
On the other hand, if someone were to mix up the pattern and come up with, for example,
     "an antique beautiful Ming little vase,"
     the listener would undoubtedly be confused.

Similarly, we might say:
      "pair of old Dutch wooden shoes," but NOT
      "a pair of wooden Dutch old shoes," or
      "a pair of wooden old Dutch shoes,"
 since these latter two phrases violate the conventions of adjective order outlined above.

Another aspect of the adjective order pattern is that when nouns are used as adjectives (and they often are), then adjectives that describe the material precede the non-material type. Thus we could say:
     "velvet ballet shoes," but NOT "ballet velvet shoes"
     "a fur coat collar" BUT NOT "a coat fur collar"
     or a "wool horse blanket" but NEVER a "horse wool blanket." (In fact, this latter suggests that the blanket is made of horse wool, and of course that is nonsense.)

Adjectives that describe the purpose of a noun come closest to it, like this:
    "a nice new pair of gardening gloves," or
    "a wonderful warm sleeping bag."
    
When should we put commas between multiple adjectives?

If the adjectives are from different classes, we needn't separate them with commas, like this:
     "a gorgeous red silk hand-made shawl"

However, if all the adjectives in a list come from the same class, we put commas between them, like this:
     "an intelligent, insightful essay" (Both adjectives are general, so no comma is used before 'and.')
     but "a red, white(,) and green flag" (All three adjectives are from the same class, colour.) The parentheses around the second comma indicates that it is optional -- one may omit the comma before 'and.'

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