Motion diagram. This sign is outside the licensed video corpus, so the diagram is its full record here.
WANT
“want”
How to make it
Hold both curved '5' hands palm-up in front of you and draw them toward your body.
Grammar
Reversing the movement (pushing the hands away, often with a slight head shake and nose wrinkle) negates it to DON'T-WANT.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The hands pull a desired thing in toward the body. The reverse push means DON'T-WANT — a rare tidy antonym pair built from direction alone.
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
Neutral space
Made at the neutral space.
Movement
a straight path
Both hands move together.
Palm facing up.