Frequency of the use of English personality adjectives: Implications for personality theory

According to the lexical hypothesis, the degree of representation of an attribute in language correlates with the general importance of that attribute in everyday transactions. The present study investigated the frequency of the use of 432 personality adjectives that Saucier and Goldberg (1996) employed as the base of their five-factor theory of personality. Google hits for bigrams consisting of a personality adjective + person varied from 51 (uninquisitive person) to 4.2 million (reasonable person). The 92 adjectives that describe agreeableness (factor II) had 29 million hits, while the 40 adjectives describing neuroticism (factor IV) had 6.9 million hits. Historical analysis showed growing popularity for factor II adjectives between 1950 and 2000. These results indicate that the Big Five factors of personality are not of equal importance in everyday personality descriptions.