Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
DAY
“day”
How to make it
Rest your dominant elbow on the back of your other hand and sweep the upright arm down across your body.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The upright arm is the sun tracking across the sky from overhead to the horizon — one day's arc. The passive forearm is the horizon line.
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
Neutral space
Made at the neutral space.
Movement
an arc
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing in.