Lexical hypothesis

[11] Sir Francis Galton was one of the first scientists to apply the lexical hypothesis to the study of personality,[4] stating: I tried to gain an idea of the number of the more conspicuous aspects of the character by counting in an appropriate dictionary the words used to express them...

[15] Nearly half a century after Galton first investigated the lexical hypothesis, Franziska Baumgarten published the first psycholexical classification of personality-descriptive terms.

Using dictionaries and characterology publications, Baumgarten identified 1,093 separate terms in the German language used for the description of personality and mental states.

[16] Although this number is similar in size to the German and English estimates offered by earlier researchers, Gordon Allport and Henry S. Odbert revealed this to be a severe underestimate in a 1936 study.

[16] Throughout the 1940s, researchers such as Raymond Cattell[5] and Donald Fiske[18] used factor analysis to explore the more general structure of the trait terms in Allport and Odbert's Column I.

[19] Despite finding a five-factor structure similar to Fiske's, Norman decided to use Allport and Odbert's original list to create a more precise and better-structured taxonomy of terms.

Using this list, Norman then removed terms that were deemed archaic or obsolete, solely evaluative, overly obscure, dialect-specific, loosely related to personality, and purely physical.

[20] Norman's work would eventually serve as the basis for Dean Peabody and Lewis Goldberg's explorations of the "Big Five" personality traits.

[21][22][23] During the 1970s, Juri Apresjan, a founder of the Moscow Semantic School, developed the systemic, or systematic, method of lexicography which utilizes the concept of the language picture of the world.