Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
OWL
“owl”
How to make it
Hold two 'O' hands in front of your eyes like a pair of round glasses and twist them slightly.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Two round eyes, turning — the owl's head swivel.
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
Eye
Made at the eye.
Movement
a twist of the wrist
Both hands move together.
Repeated. Palm facing in.