this statement has become known as the lexical hypothesis, which posits that if there is a word for a trait, it must be a real trait. allport and odbert utilized this hypothesis to identify personality traits by working through two of the most comprehensive dictionaries of the english language available at the time, and extracting 18,000 personality-describing words. from this gigantic list they extracted 4500 personality-describing adjectives which they considered to describe observable and relatively permanent traits.