Lexical hypothesis

In personality psychology, the lexical hypothesis (also known as the fundamental lexical hypothesis, lexical approach, or sedimentation hypothesis) generally includes two postulates:

1. Those personality characteristics that are important to a group of people will eventually become a part of that group's language.

and that therefore:

2. More important personality characteristics are more likely to be encoded into language as a single word.

With origins during the late 19th century, use of the lexical hypothesis began to flourish in English and German psychology during the early 20th century. The lexical hypothesis is a major basis of the study of the Big Five personality traits, the HEXACO model of personality structure and the 16PF Questionnaire and has been used to study the structure of personality traits in a number of cultural and linguistic settings.