Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
SICK
“sick”
Touch the bent middle finger of an 'open 8' hand to your forehead (the other hand may touch the stomach), with a pained face.
The face carries the severity: a slight grimace is 'under the weather'; a full wince with a slow movement is 'very sick'.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The bent middle finger is ASL's 'feeling' handshape, here placed at the head — where you feel ill. It belongs to the same handshape family as FEEL, LIKE and EXCITED.
- 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.
Made at the forehead.
One-handed.
Palm facing in.