Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
FOOD
“food”
How to make it
Tap a flat 'O' hand to your lips twice, in small movements.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The noun derived from EAT by repetition and reduction — the pattern Supalla and Newport described for dozens of noun-verb pairs.
Sources
- Supalla & Newport 1978Supalla, Ted, and Elissa Newport. "How Many Seats in a Chair? The Derivation of Nouns and Verbs in American Sign Language." In Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, edited by Patricia Siple, 91–132. Academic Press, 1978.
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
Mouth
Made at the mouth.
Movement
a tap
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from FOOD in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.