Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
DUCK
“duck”
At your mouth, snap the index and middle fingers against the thumb like a wide beak.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
A broad beak, made with two fingers where BIRD uses one. The extra finger is the duck's wide bill.
- 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.
Starts as thumb, index, and middle out; ends as fingertips flattened down to meet the thumb (a closed 'beak').
Also: number 3
Made at the mouth.
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from DUCK in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.