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A Slippery Grammatical Label

Determiners are functional elements of structure and not formal word classes, because the group of words contains some items that are nouns, some that are pronouns, and some that are adjectives. Authors Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner explain: "Determiners are sometimes called limiting adjectives in traditional grammar. However, they not only differ from the class of adjectives by meaning, but also must normally precede ordinary adjectives in noun phrase structure. Further, among determiners themselves there are co-occurrence restrictions and fairly strict rules of word order." ("Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar." Oxford University Press, 1994. Rules on Multiple Determiners: English has rules on word order, such as when there are multiple adjectives in a row modifying the same noun (quantity before age, before color, for example). The same goes for when you use multiple determiners in a row. 

"When there is more than one determiner, follow these useful rules:

a) Place all and both in front of other determiners.
E.g. We ate all the food. Both my sons are at college.
b) Place what and such in front of a and an in exclamations.
E.g. What an awful day! I've never seen such a crowd!
c) Place many, much, more, most, few, little after other determiners.
E.g. His many successes made him famous. They have no more food. What little money I have is yours."​ 

(Geoffrey N. Leech, Benita Cruickshank, and Roz Ivanič, "An A-Z of English Grammar & Usage," 2nd ed. Longman, 2001) Count and Noncount Nouns. Some determiners work with count nouns, and some don't. For example, many attaches to count nouns, such as "The child had many marbles." In contrast, you would not use much to attach to count nouns such as marbles but noncount nouns such as work, for example in, "The college student had much work to finish before finals week." Other determiners work with either one, such as all: "The child had all the marbles" and "The college student had all the work to finish before finals week."

In languages that employ articles, every common noun, with some exceptions, is expressed with a certain definiteness, definite or indefinite, as an attribute (similar to the way many languages express every noun with a certain grammatical number—singular or plural—or a grammatical gender). Articles are among the most common words in many languages; in English, for example, the most frequent word is the.^[3]

Articles are usually categorized as either definite or indefinite.^[4] A few languages with well-developed systems of articles may distinguish additional subtypes. Within each type, languages may have various forms of each article, due to conforming to grammatical attributes such as gender, number, or case. Articles may also be modified as influenced by adjacent sounds or words as in elision (e.g., French "le" becoming "l'" before a vowel), epenthesis (e.g., English "a" becoming "an" before a vowel), or contraction (e.g. Irish "i + na" becoming "sna").

The definite article, the, is used to refer to a particular member of a group or class. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned or it may be something uniquely specified. The is the only definite article in English, for both singular and plural nouns.