Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
ORANGE
“orange”
How to make it
Hold a loose fist in front of your chin and squeeze it closed a couple of times.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Squeezing an orange at the mouth. The sign covers both the fruit and the color, as the English word does.
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.
Handshape
Starts as fingers curved into a c shape; ends as a fist with the thumb across the front.
Also: letter C
Location
Chin
Made at the chin.
Movement
the hand opening and closing
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing in.