Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
WET
“wet”
Hold two open hands out and close them slowly into flat 'O's, as if squeezing water out.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
Wringing out something soaked. Some signers start with a touch to the chin (WATER).
- 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.
Starts as all five fingers spread open; ends as fingertips flattened down to meet the thumb (a closed 'beak').
Also: number 5
Made at the neutral space.
Both hands move together.
Repeated. Palm facing up.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from WET in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.