Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
SLEEP
“sleep”
How to make it
Draw an open hand down over your face, closing it as your eyes close.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The hand draws the face into sleep, eyes closing. Its older form — a hand against the cheek — survives inside HOME.
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 all five fingers spread open; ends as fingertips flattened down to meet the thumb (a closed 'beak').
Also: number 5
Location
Forehead
Moves from the forehead to the chin.
Movement
a straight path
One-handed.
Palm facing in.