Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
SLEEPY
“sleepy”
Let an open hand droop down in front of your face, closing slightly, as your eyelids drop.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
SLEEP made slack and repeated — the face sagging toward sleep without getting there.
- 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.
Starts as all five fingers spread open; ends as five fingers spread and curved like a claw.
Also: number 5
Moves from the eye to the chin.
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from SLEEPY in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.