International audience ; Personality has been conceptualized from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and at various levels of abstraction or breadth. In personality research, the most common unit of measurement of individual differences remains trait. Today, a consensus seems to emerge as a general taxonomy of personality traits known as the Big Five, an expression introduced by Goldberg. The aim of this article is to describe the circumstances surrounding the elaboration of the Big Five Inventory in 1991 by John, Donahue, and Kentle, to put it back in its historical context, and compare it to the different tests available such as “TDA or trait descriptive adjective” of Goldberg and “NEO PI-R or NEO personality inventory revised” of Costa and McCrae. First, the different steps of category conceptualisation, developed from adjectives selected from the English dictionary to distinguish the behaviour of one human being from that of another will be considered. Only the traits have been used to elaborate the three tests. Factor structures resembling the Big Five were identified in numerous sets of variables. The Big Five were the only consistently replicable factors known as E (Extraversion, Energy, Enthusiasm), A (Agreeableness, Altruism, Affection), C (Conscientiousness, Control, Constraint), N (Neuroticism, Negative Affectivity, Nervousness), O (Openness, Originality, Open-mindedness). The reader intrigued by anagrams may have noticed that these letters form the OCEAN or the CANOE of personality dimensions. The Big Five structure captures, at a broad level of abstraction, the commonalities among most of the existing systems of personality description, and provides an integrative descriptive model for personality research. ; La description de la personnalité a été conçue à partir d’une variété de points de vue théoriques et à différents niveaux d’abstraction. Dans l’étude de la personnalité, l’unité la plus fréquemment utilisée pour mesurer les différences individuelles a été le trait. Un consensus semble se ...