Boiling down the dictionary
Each step shrank the list. The bars are drawn on a log scale, because a straight scale would make the last three steps invisible.
Same five, three sets of names
The structure held while the labels changed. The field largely ignored it for two decades, until Goldberg reached the same five from his own lexical analyses.4
Each row is one factor. Tupes and Christal's 1961 report was a military technical document, which is one reason it stayed obscure for years.3
Describe yourself as you generally are now
These are Donnellan and colleagues' 20 items, four per trait, taken from Goldberg's public-domain International Personality Item Pool.6 Rate how accurately each phrase describes you.
Items and reverse-keying follow the published Mini-IPIP.7 Neuroticism is reported as Emotional Stability here (high = calmer), which reverses the direction of the Neuroticism items. Answers stay in your browser. This is a short research instrument, not a clinical or hiring assessment.
References
- [1]Big-Five model (encyclopedia chapter). ResearchGate.researchgate.net
- [2]Wikipedia contributors. Lexical hypothesis (accessed 1 Oct 2026).en.wikipedia.org
- [3]The history of the Big Five: from Allport to Goldberg. Cèrcol.cercol.team
- [4]Big Five: how the five emerged. Sociotype.sociotype.com
- [5]Modelling and analysing behaviours and emotions via complex user interactions (thesis). arXiv 1902.07683.arxiv.org
- [6]Sibley, C. G. The Mini-IPIP6: item response theory analysis of a short measure of the big-six factors of personality. New Zealand Journal of Psychology (PDF).psychology.org.nz
- [7]Mini-IPIP items, adapted from Donnellan et al. (2006). Table 3 in a PubMed Central article.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- [8]How did we end up with 5 big factors of personality? Psychology Today (Feb 2021).psychologytoday.com
Related historical tests
Cattell worked from the same Allport–Odbert word list and settled on 16 primary factors. Reanalyses of his own data were where the five broad factors first appeared.
Costa and McCrae built the first major published questionnaire around the five factors, four years after Goldberg named them. Where the NEO is a commercial test, the IPIP items used on this page are in the public domain.
The MBTI sorts people into 16 types, while the Big Five places everyone on five continuous scales. Both are self-report questionnaires, but only the Big Five came out of factor analysis of trait language.
The MMPI chose items by whether they told clinical groups apart, not by how everyday language describes people. The two represent the main alternative routes to building a personality measure.