Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
HIGH
“high”
How to make it
Raise an 'H' hand upward in front of you in two small steps.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with H, moving up. Height in the movement, letter in the hand.
Sources
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok 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
Neutral space
Moves from the neutral space to the shoulder.
Movement
upward
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing left.