Abstract
McCrae (1990) has argued that Openness to Experience is a fundamental dimension of personality that is not well represented among English‐language trait adjectives. Presumably, then, studies of personality adjectives will inevitably fail to capture at least one fundamental personality dimension. I argue that the language does contain many adjectives referring to Openness, and that recent studies of the language of personality reveal a large factor clearly related to both Openness and Intellect. These studies support both the Openness construct and the questionnaire version of the five basic factors. Lexical and questionnaire methods appear to converge on a single structural framework for basic personality traits.

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