Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
LOUD
“loud”
Point to your ear, then shake two open hands outward as if the noise fills the space.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
HEAR followed by a vibration filling the air. The corpus lists this and NOISY separately; the forms overlap heavily.
- 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.
Starts as index finger up, the rest closed; ends as all five fingers spread open.
Also: number 1
Moves from the ear to the neutral space.
One-handed.
Palm facing down.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from LOUD in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.