Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
HORSE
“horse”
How to make it
Rest the thumb of a 'U' hand at your temple and flap the two fingers forward twice.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The fingers are a horse's ear, twitching. Animal signs often pick one depictable feature; here it is the ear.
Sources
- 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.
Location
Temple
Made at the temple.
Movement
a nodding motion
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from HORSE in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.