This is the first English report of the procedures and findings from a project whose aim is the development of a computerized thesaurus of Russian personality‐descriptive terms as a special instrument for providing computer‐based test interpretations. Our empirical analyses were carried out in two waves: in 1983–1984, we examined the relations among 1530 trait–descriptive terms; and in 1986–1987, we examined the rela tions among 1650 such terms. Our present Russian personality lexicon includes 2090 trait terms, of which 68 per cent are adjectives and 32 per cent are nouns. Here, we present some findings from both cluster analyses and factor analyses of these Russian terms and show that our findings are rather concordant with those of Goldberg (1990), using English trait adjectives. Finally, we discuss a computer–based system that could provide a convenient tool for studying cross‐language similarities and differences in personality lexicons.
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