Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
LIKE
“like”
Touch the thumb and middle finger of an open '8' hand to your chest, then pull the hand away as they close.
Negated by reversing the movement and shaking the head: DON'T-LIKE. Note the English word 'like' (similar to) is a different sign — SAME.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The 'feeling' middle finger drawn from the heart — the same handshape family as FEEL, EXCITED and SICK. Pushed away with a head shake it becomes DON'T-LIKE.
- Frishberg 1975 (parameter families)Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. 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.
Starts as middle finger bent toward the thumb but not touching — the 'feeling' hand; ends as middle finger and thumb touching, others up.
Moves from the chest to the neutral space.
One-handed.
Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from LIKE in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.