How to Describe People in English: Appearance, Character Traits and Emotions

How to Describe People in English

An adjective is a describing word, the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.

In this lesson, we will learn useful Adjectives to describe people in three ways:

1. Describing someone’s appearance

2. Describing someone’s character and personality

3. Describing someone’s feelings & emotions

1. Describing Someone’s Appearance

Appearance is defined as the way someone or something looks.

This is list of adjectives to describe a person’s appearance:

beautiful (My younger sister is very beautiful.)

handsome (He’s the most handsome man I’ve ever met.)

cute (That’s a cute little baby.)

thin (She was looking pale and thin.)

tall (She’s tall and thin.)

chubby (She was eleven years old and pretty in a chubby sort of way.)

muscular (He was tall, lean and muscular.)

attractive (The actress is an attractive woman.)

…

2. Describing Someone’s Character and Personality

Character traits are qualities or characteristics that describe what a person is like. It’s important to be able to describe your own personality or someone else’s.

Here is a list of English Adjectives to describe someone’s personality.

polite (Please be polite to our guests.)

friendly (Everyone was very friendly towards me.)

honest (He was a hard-working honest man.)

generous (She’s always very generous to the kids.)

rude (She was very rude about my driving.)

lazy (He is the laziest boy in the class.)

angry (I was very angry with myself for making such a stupid mistake.)

3. Describing Someone’s Feelings & Emotions

Sometimes it’s hard to explain exactly how you feel. This vocabulary list helps you narrow down exactly what word best expresses your current emotional state.

terrified (She looked at him with wide, terrified eyes.)

exhausted (You look absolutely exhausted.)

scared (People are scared to use the buses late at night.)

nervous (She was so nervous about her exams that she couldn’t sleep.)

embarrassed (She’s embarrassed about her height.)