Gordon Allport and his colleagues’ approach to personality led to the development of the five-factor model. Their approach, called the __________________, theorized that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people.

In psychology, the lexical hypothesis is a thesis, that states that personality characteristics that are viewed as important to a group of people will become part of that group's language. Also it states that the more important personality characteristics are likely to be encoded into language as a single word.

Allport work was based on this hypothesis, since he and his colleagues identify nearly 18,000 terms that described personality (they took these terms from the dictionary). Later, these terms were condensed and grouped into 16 factors that ended up being the main part of the 16PF personality questionnaire and finally encoded into 5 factors that encode personality traits and that are used to this day.

Therefore, we can say that the lexical hypothesis theorized that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people.