Free personality tests, from the Big Five to love languages

For a picture of your whole personality, start with the Big Five personality test or the HEXACO personality test. The Big Five scores five broad traits with 50 public-domain items, while HEXACO adds a sixth, Honesty-Humility, which covers sincerity, fairness and modesty. If you would rather have a label you can remember, the 16 personality test gives you a four-letter type, and the Enneagram test points to one of nine types built around a core motivation.

For work and communication, the DISC personality test shows how you lean across Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness, which makes it easy to talk about team roles. The locus of control test looks at whether you tend to credit what happens to your own effort or to luck, other people and circumstances.

For relationships, the attachment style test scores secure, anxious, avoidant and fearful-avoidant patterns in close bonds. The love language test shows which of five ways of giving and receiving care matters most to you, and the love style test uses John Alan Lee's six styles, from passionate Eros to selfless Agape.

For social energy, the introvert extrovert test places you on a single scale, with an ambivert band in the middle. If you are curious about the darker side, the Dark Triad test scores Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy as everyday traits rather than clinical labels. Most people get the clearest picture by combining personality tests from two or three of these groups.

The Big Five and HEXACO are the best supported models on this page. Both grew out of research on the words people use to describe each other, and both have been studied in many languages and countries. Attachment styles, locus of control and the Dark Triad also come from established lines of research in psychology, although studies usually measure them with longer questionnaires than a quick online test.

The 16 types, the Enneagram and DISC are popular personality tests for self-reflection and team conversations, but they generally have less research support as measurement tools. Love languages and love styles are best treated as frameworks for talking about relationships: love styles have a longer research history, while the five love languages come from a popular book and have had mixed results in studies.

One more honest note: only the Big Five test uses published public-domain items. The other questionnaires use original statements written for this site from the published models and have not been validated on their own, so treat all of these personality tests as structured self-reflection rather than precise measurement.

Personality tests come in two broad families. Trait models, such as the Big Five and HEXACO, place you on continuous scales, and most people land near the middle on at least a few traits, which makes the scores precise. Type models, such as the 16 types and the Enneagram, sort people into categories: less detail, but easier to remember and talk about. DISC, attachment style and love language sit in between, scoring every style and highlighting your strongest one.

Answer as you usually are, not as you would like to be or as your job expects you to be. Go with your first honest reaction, and use the neutral option when a statement really does not apply. Personality tests built on self-report can only reflect the picture you give them, so the more candid you are, the more useful the result.

Treat your results as a mirror, not a verdict. Notice what fits and what does not, and ask someone who knows you well whether they agree. Your answers also shift a little with mood, so retaking personality tests after a few months shows which parts of your profile are stable and which ones move.

All the personality tests here are free and need no account or email. Your answers are scored in your browser and are not sent to our servers. Each test ends on a free results page with share images, and if you want a printable copy you can buy an optional PDF report of a result. Every test is available in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

The site's political tests, such as the 12 Axes test and 8values, are free in the same way and place you on several axes instead of a single left-right line.