Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
GOOD
“good”
How to make it
Touch a flat hand to your chin, then bring it down onto your other flat palm.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Shares its origin with THANK-YOU: something good comes from the mouth and is presented. The drop onto the passive palm distinguishes it.
Sources
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011Shaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). 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
Chin
Moves from the chin to the weak palm.
Movement
an arc
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from GOOD in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.