Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
TIGER
“tiger”
Hold both claw hands in front of your face and draw them outward toward the cheeks, twice.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The fingers draw stripes across the face — or whiskers, depending on whom you ask. Either way, the depiction is of the face markings.
- 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.
Moves from the nose to the cheek.
Both hands move together.
Repeated. Palm facing in.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from TIGER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.