The Big Five Factor Marker Adjectives Are Not Especially Popular Words. Are They Superior Descriptors?

Vocabularies of natural languages evolve over time. Useful words become more popular and useless concepts disappear. In this study, the frequency of the use of 295 English, 100 German, and 114 French personality adjectives in book texts and Twitter messages as qualifiers of the words person, woman, homme, femme, and Person was studied. Word frequency data were compared to factor loadings from previous factor analytic studies on personality terms. The correlation between the popularity of an adjective and its highest primary loading in five- and six-factor models was low (-0.12 to 0.17). The Big five (six) marker adjectives were not more popular than "blended" adjectives that had moderate loadings on several factors. This finding implies that laymen consider "blended" adjectives as equally useful descriptors compared to adjectives that represent core features of the five (six) factors. These results are compatible with three hypotheses: 1) laymen are not good at describing personality, 2) the five (six) factors are artifacts of research methods, 3) the interaction of the five (six) factors is not well understood.