Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
SIT
“sit”
Lay the two fingers of an 'H' hand across the two fingers of your other 'H' hand, once.
SIT and CHAIR are a documented noun-verb pair: the verb is one movement, the noun the same movement made small and repeated.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Two legs (the top fingers) hang over the edge of a bench (the bottom fingers).
- 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.
Made at the weak hand.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing down.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from SIT in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.