Trying to find the right words to describe yourself? Learn the best words to describe your own unique personality with TraitLab.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Gregory Park, Ph.D.
Author
What are the best words to describe your personality?
How would you describe yourself?
Most people avoid focusing their own personality when answering this question. Instead, they may talk about their job, their hobbies and interests, places they’ve lived, or other basic background facts about themselves.
Truly and accurately describing your own personality — your unique style of thinking, behaving, and feeling — is quite difficult, because it requires you to take a step back, evaluate yourself objectively, and compare yourself to other people.
The Personality Wordcloud tool in TraitLab Plus makes this easy by creating your own personal wordcloud, filled with words describing your unique combination of personality traits.
Which words describe you?
Compassionate or cynical? Combative or cooperative? Sentimental or insensitive? Discover 100+ words that describe your unique personality.
Describing the differences between people in a consistent and precise way is very difficult. Modern personality assessments are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Among scientific researchers, who solve these sorts of problems for a living, the most widely-accepted system for describing personality differences is easily the Big Five.
The Big Five isn’t the only way psychologists think about personality, but it’s the one that has the most scientific research behind it — thousands of studies involving millions of participants).
Research studies have connected the Big Five to just about everything: our relationships, career preferences, moods and temperment, music preferences, physiology, and, of course, the words we use to describe ourselves and other people.
The Big Five Personality dimensions are Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion (or Introversion), Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, or OCEAN, for short.
Like everyone else, you fall somewhere between high and low on all five dimensions. When you complete the basic assessments within TraitLab, you’ll receive a score from 0 (low) to 100 (high) on each dimension.
Knowing where you stand on all five dimensions gives you a richer understanding of your typical patterns of thinking, behaving, and feeling, and how you are similar to, or different, from others.
Below, I’ve given a simple description of each dimension, and some examples of words used to describe people who are either high or low on that dimension.1
Openness describes your preference and tolerance for new experiences, ideas, and feelings.
Highly open people tend to be highly imaginative, curious, have diverse intellectual and artistic interests, and are more likely to have unconventional habits, ideas, or beliefs.
Less open (or more traditional) people gravitate towards more familiar experiences, are generally less interested in novelty, and hold more conventional interests, ideas, and beliefs.
| High Openness | Low Openness |
|---|---|
| imaginative | traditional |
| philosophical | unsophisticated |
| creative | predictable |
| artistic | conventional |
| eccentric | provincial |
Conscientiousness describes your planning, impulsivity, and tendency to follow socially accepted norms and rules.
Highly conscientious people tend to be highly organized and systematic, create detailed plans, are less easily distracted, and more likely to closely follow rules and guidelines across many situations.
Less conscientious (or more spontaneous) people are less systematic in their planning and decisions, are less focused on long-term goals or achievements, are less likely to conform to socially accepted norms and rules, and are generally more spontaneous across situations.
| High Conscientiousness | Low Conscientiousness |
|---|---|
| systematic | impulsive |
| orderly | haphazard |
| meticulous | careless |
| dependable | erratic |
| thorough | frivolous |
Extraversion (or the opposite, Introversion) describes your tendencies around social engagement and positive emotionality.
Highly extraverted people tend to actively engage with others, be more assertive, active, and talkative, and generally experience more positive emotions (e.g., joy, happiness, enthusiasm) across most situations.
Less extraverted people (or highly introverted people) tend to engage in more solitary activities, gravitate towards less stimulating environments, be more passive, inhibited, and reserved, and generally experience positive emotions less frequently and less intensely across most situations.
| High Extraversion | Low Extraversion |
|---|---|
| talkative | quiet |
| assertive | shy |
| energetic | inhibited |
| sociable | reserved |
| bold | bashful |
Agreeableness describes your motivation to maintain positive relationships with others.
Highly agreeable people are strongly motivated to maintain warmer and friendlier relations with others, seek to reduce or resolve interpersonal conflict, maintain or increase group cooperation, and control negative emotions around other people.
Less agreeable (or more demanding) people are more strongly motivated to pursue personal goals over positive relations with others, in doing so, are more willing to create conflict and disagreement, attempt to impose their will on others, and display or express negative emotions to others.
| High Agreeableness | Low Agreeableness |
|---|---|
| warm | cold |
| compassionate | insensitive |
| polite | demanding |
| considerate | impersonal |
| helpful | uncooperative |
Neuroticism describes your emotional variability and tendency to experience negative emotions.
Highly neurotic people have more frequent mood swings, have greater tendency to worry, are more easily irritated and susceptible to anxious or depressed moods.
Less neurotic (or more emotionally stable) people worry less and are less reactive to stress, experience less depression and anxiety, and are generally more easy-going.
| High Neuroticism | Low Neuroticism |
|---|---|
| moody | unemotional |
| defensive | confident |
| nervous | relaxed |
| high-strung | unexcitable |
| fidgety | patient |
The examples above are only fraction of the hundreds of words related to the Big Five dimensions. With TraitLab’s Personality Wordcloud tool, you’ll see a preview of your own personal wordcloud, based on your unique personality.
After calculating your position on each of the Big Five dimensions, TraitLab compares your results to published research on the words people use to describe themselves and others, ranking hundreds of words based on their similarity to your unique blend of traits. Finally, it generates a wordcloud of your most similar words sized by similarity (bigger words are more similar to you).
Here’s an example of an real result. Based on the Big Five assessment, this person was very high on Introversion and Openness to Experience, a little above average on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and average on Neuroticism.
Want to see yours? You can start building your personality profile now with a free TraitLab account and upgrade anytime to see your personality wordcloud.
1: In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers asked participants to rate hundreds of words based on how well each word described them. These participants also completed a measure of the Big Five personality dimensions. Researchers found that the words people used to describe themselves were consistently to their combinations of five personality dimensions. The research findings included the list of words used in the study, and their statistical relationship to the Big Five dimensions.
