Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
THIRSTY
“thirsty”
How to make it
Draw the tip of your index finger down the front of your throat.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
A dry throat, traced. HUNGRY takes the same path with a C hand — a handshape minimal pair.
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.
Location
Neck
Moves from the neck to the chest.
Movement
downward
One-handed.
Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from THIRSTY in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.