Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
WATER
“water”
Tap the index-side of a 'W' hand against your chin a couple of times.
Initialized signs like this are English-influenced. Some signers and educators prefer non-initialized alternatives; both are in use.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
An initialized sign: the 'W' handshape borrows the first letter of the English word 'water', placed at the mouth where drinking happens. Initialization is a documented borrowing pattern, not folk guessing.
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press, 1978.
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.
Repeated. Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from WATER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.