The 16 personality types

The 16 types describe personality through four preferences: where you direct your energy (Extraversion or Introversion), how you take in information (Sensing or Intuition), how you make decisions (Thinking or Feeling) and how you like to organise your outer life (Judging or Perceiving). Take one letter from each pair and you get a four-letter code such as INFJ or ESTP. The idea goes back to Carl Jung's psychological types.

Our version is built on an open questionnaire of items from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain collection used by researchers around the world. It measures five broad traits and derives the four letters from them, showing how clear each preference is rather than pretending everyone is purely one or the other. Our 16 types are independent and not affiliated with The Myers-Briggs Company; the nicknames and descriptions on these pages are our own.

Each type page covers the type's strengths, its growth edges, its style in relationships and its cognitive functions — the four mental processes, from dominant to inferior, that type theory uses to explain why an INTJ and an INTP can feel so different despite sharing three letters. You'll also see which types are the most and least natural matches in the compatibility table our matching uses, with the reasoning behind each pairing.

Types describe preferences, not abilities or limits. Anyone can develop any skill, and people of the same type vary enormously. Use your type as a vocabulary for understanding yourself and others — and take the free test if you'd like to find yours.