Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
CLEAN
“clean”
How to make it
Wipe the palm of one flat hand across the upturned palm of the other, once.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Wiping a surface clean. The identical sign means NICE; context and mouthing decide.
Sources
- 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.
Location
Weak palm
Made at the weak palm.
Movement
a straight path
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing down.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from CLEAN in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.