Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
THANK-YOU
“thank you”
Touch the fingertips of a flat hand to your chin and move the hand forward toward the person.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
The hand extends outward from the mouth, giving words of thanks toward the recipient — a gesture of offering from the lips. Documented in the French Sign Language lineage ASL descends from.
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011 (LSF lineage)Shaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). 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 chin.
One-handed.
Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from THANK-YOU in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.