The origins of personality assessment date back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when personality was assessed through phrenology, the measurement of bumps on the human skull, and physiognomy, which assessed personality based on a person's outer appearances. Sir Francis Galton took another approach to assessing personality late in the 19th century. Based on the lexical hypothesis, Galton estimated the number of adjectives that described personality in the English dictionary. Galton's list was eventually refined by Louis Leon Thurstone to 60 words that were commonly used for describing personality at the time. Through factor analyzing responses from 1300 participants, Thurstone was able to reduce this severely restricted pool of 60 adjectives into seven common factors. This procedure of factor analyzing common adjectives was later utilized by Raymond Cattell (7th most highly cited psychologist of the 20th Century—based on the peer-reviewed journal literature), who subsequently utilized a data set of over 4000 affect terms from the English dictionary that eventually resulted in construction of the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) which also measured up to eight second-stratum personality factors. Of the many introspective (i.e., subjective) self-report instruments constructed to measure the putative Big Five personality dimensions, perhaps the most popular has been the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) However, the psychometric properties of the NEO-PI-R (including its factor analytic/construct validity) has been severely criticized.
What is a personality test?
Personality test is a test of measuring human personality constructs. Its origin can be dated back to 18th century. There are many different types of personality assessment measures.  These tests are designed to draw knowledge about an individual's interest, interactive style and many other things.