Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
FEEL
“feel”
How to make it
Brush the bent middle finger of an 'open-8' hand upward on your chest.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The bent middle finger is ASL's dedicated 'feeling' handshape — it recurs across FEEL, SICK, EXCITE, LIKE, INTERESTED. Learning the handshape once unlocks a whole family of emotion verbs.
Sources
- Frishberg 1975 (parameter families)Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. 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
Chest
Made at the chest.
Movement
a brushing motion
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing in.