Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
HOUSE
“house”
How to make it
Touch the fingertips of two flat hands to form a roof peak, then draw them down and apart as walls.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Roof, then walls. The HOUSE that once began the compound HOME.
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
- 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
Forehead
Moves from the forehead to the neutral space.
Movement
a straight path
Both hands move together.
Palm facing out.