In 1936, two psychologists went through Webster's and pulled out every word in English that describes what a person is like — close to 18,000 of them. Decades of statistics on how those words cluster together kept landing on the same five groupings, in language after language. Nobody chose five. Five is just what the data kept doing.
Allport & Odbert, 1936 · 17,953 trait words
Eight questions in — you've now touched all seven traits once. The next round is where the picture sharpens.
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