Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
QUIET
“quiet”
How to make it
Cross two flat hands at your lips, then lower them apart, palms down — a hush.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
A shushing finger at the lips, then calm hands settling the air.
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
Mouth
Moves from the mouth to the neutral space.
Movement
downward
Both hands move together.
Palm facing down.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from QUIET in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.