Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
BIG
“big”
Hold both 'L' hands near each other and pull them apart to show size.
Size and degree are shown by how big and how tense the movement is, often with a puffed-cheek 'cha' mouth morpheme for 'enormous'. The adjective's intensity lives in the body, not a separate word.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The hands measure out a large span. Pulling farther exaggerates to 'huge' — the movement scales with meaning.
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. link
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Made at the neutral space.
Both hands move together.
Palm facing out.