The Big Five

The Big Five, I believe, is a breakthrough in defining a part of psychology that is very mysterious and hard to define; defining a person's personality. Every person is unique in some way; different people act differently in the same situations. This is a subject that psychologist have been trying to define for many years.
Languages have thousands of words just to describe personality; many of them describe the same type of emotion. The Big Five put thousands of describing words, of many languages from many cultures, into five categories. The five categories may slightly alter among different cultures, and/or includes more categories. The Big Five, in the United States, consist of: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In other cultures, openness to experience isn't always used and may be removed; other categories such as religiosity, manipulativeness, sense of humor, motivation, and honesty are just some other examples.
Each of these five categories consists of sub groups formed of other describing words. Ones which we use on a daily basis such as shy, conceited, and tidy are all included.
The Big Five has been implemented in job, schools, and on the internet for personal use. Even the simplest test consisting of true or false questions, with as few as twenty questions, is capable of showing a small aspect of one's personality. An interesting aspect of the Big Five is even if four of the five categories are defined, the one category which is undefined allows for a tremendous amount of variance in the personality of the person who is being described. The Big Five helps categorize peoples' personalities, but there will always be an exception to the rule.