The last lesson ended with a phrase, ḫt nbt nfrt, "every good thing", where the adjectives took the feminine ending of their noun. This lesson is about where adjectives go, and about the most common of them all, nb, "every".
The rule is short. An Egyptian adjective that describes a noun comes after it, never before, and agrees with it in gender and number. Alan Gardiner's example is sḫr pn bin, "this evil counsel": word for word, "counsel this evil". James Allen calls the rule invariable.
Agreement uses the endings you already know from nouns. The masculine singular has no ending: nfr, "good". The feminine adds t: nfrt. The masculine plural adds w: nfrw. In Middle Egyptian a feminine adjective usually keeps the same form whether its noun is singular or plural.
Most adjectives are made from verbs: nfr, "good", is a form of the verb nfr, "to be good". Allen counts only one adjective that is not made from another word, and it is nb, "every", "any" or "all". When a noun has several describing words, nb goes first, and so do demonstratives such as pn, "this". A possessive ending such as f, "his", is joined to the noun itself, so it comes before every adjective. Gardiner's example is sꜣt·f šrit, "his little daughter", word for word "daughter-his little".
Word order matters most with nb, because Egyptian has a second word written the same way: the noun nb, "lord" or "owner", feminine nbt, "lady". Write nb after pr, "house", and you have pr nb, "every house". Write it before and you have nb pr, "lord of the house". The adjective nb can never stand on its own, so a nb with no noun in front of it is always "lord": nb pn is "this lord", not "all this".
Expect nb to look shorter than it is. Gardiner notes that it usually leaves its plural ending unwritten and often its feminine one, which is why Gardiner puts those letters in brackets: nṯrw nb(w), "all gods", and ḫt nb(t), "everything".
One word breaks the pattern. ky, "other", feminine kt, comes before its noun. Allen explains why: it is really a noun, "another one", not an adjective at all.
Because adjectives carry gender and number, they can also stand alone as nouns, often with a determinative to say what kind of thing is meant. šri, "small", with a child sign is "small boy". nfrt, "beautiful one", becomes "beautiful woman" with a seated woman, or "beautiful cow" with a cow.
Finally, watch for an adjective at the front. Placed before its noun, an adjective stops describing and starts making a statement, and it no longer changes its ending: nfr ib·i is not "my good heart" but "my heart is happy". That is a sentence without a verb, and a later lesson is about those. For now, the habit is simple: when an adjective follows a noun, read it as part of that noun.