Everything we point to, and why.
This site is one tool. The language belongs to the Deaf community, and the best resources for learning it are made there. Below: where to look up signs we don't have, where to find a class, who to follow, the scholarship behind our claims, and a glossary of the terms you'll meet.
Dictionaries
Where to look up a sign we don't have. Each has a different strength; none may be embedded here, so we link.
- ASL University (Lifeprint)Deaf-led
Bill Vicars's free dictionary and curriculum — the most-used learner reference on the web, with careful notes on variation. Its terms of use forbid reusing its media in other apps, so use it there.
- HandspeakDeaf-led
Jolanta Lapiak's Deaf-run dictionary with a reverse dictionary (search by handshape), etymology notes, and Deaf culture articles.
- Signing SavvyPaid
Large video dictionary with multiple variants per word and a word-list builder. Free to browse, membership for extras.
A lexical database built for linguists, with consistent ID glosses. Useful when you want to know how a sign is referred to in research.
Courses and structured learning
Free and paid curricula. A class with a Deaf teacher beats any app, this one included.
- Gallaudet University ASL ConnectDeaf-led
Free introductory lessons and paid courses from the world's only university designed for Deaf and hard of hearing students.
The National Association of the Deaf's guidance on finding a class. In-person courses with Deaf instructors are the single best investment a learner can make.
- Lifeprint curriculum (ASL 1–4)Deaf-led
A complete free sequence of lessons with vocabulary, grammar, and practice sentences, used by many college programs.
Deaf organizations and community
The language belongs to its community. These are the places to find events, teachers, interpreters, and current norms.
The civil-rights organization of, by, and for Deaf and hard of hearing Americans since 1880. Position statements, advocacy, and resources.
Certifies interpreters and publishes professional standards. Relevant if you are considering interpreting as a path.
- National Black Deaf AdvocatesDeaf-led
Advocacy and community for Black Deaf and hard of hearing people; the living community behind Black ASL.
- World Federation of the DeafDeaf-led
The international body whose statements on signing avatars and sign language technology shaped what this project deliberately does not build.
ASL socials and Deaf coffee chats exist in most cities. Go, watch, be humble, and let people know you are learning.
Linguistics and databases
The research our evidence tiers rest on, and the databases we check phonology against.
Phonological coding, frequency, and Deaf-signer iconicity ratings for 2,700+ signs. The database we cite for iconicity and check our handshape and location coding against.
Georgetown's searchable archive of early ASL films and dictionaries (1910s–1920s). See how a sign was made a century ago.
The journal Stokoe founded. Where much of the research on ASL history and variation is published.
George Veditz's filmed address, made to preserve signing during the oralist era. In the National Film Registry; watch a century-old form of the language.
Books
History and culture, written by people inside it.
Emily Shaw and Yves Delaporte. The book behind most of our 'documented' etymologies. Rigorous, and honest about what is unknown.
- Deaf in America: Voices from a CultureDeaf-ledPaid
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. The essential introduction to Deaf culture from inside it.
McCaskill, Lucas, Bayley and Hill. The landmark study of Black ASL's history and structure, with an accompanying documentary.
- Seeing VoicesPaid
Oliver Sacks. A hearing outsider's account of Deaf history and the 1988 Gallaudet protest — readable, dated in places, and worth pairing with Padden and Humphries.
Watching real signing
Receptive skill grows from watching fluent signers at natural speed. Prefer Deaf creators.
- The Daily MothDeaf-led
Daily news delivered in ASL by a Deaf anchor. Real-speed signing about current events — ideal receptive practice once you have some vocabulary.
Music videos, news, and entertainment in ASL. DPAN also recruited the signers who recorded the PopSign corpus.
- ASL NookDeaf-led
A Deaf family teaching everyday vocabulary through short videos — the natural companion to our child-first CDI word list.
The corpus behind this site
What our video layer is licensed from, and why it is the only set we can use.
- PopSign ASL v1.0Deaf-led
250 CDI signs recorded by 47 Deaf adults, released under CC BY 4.0 — the only ASL video corpus that is Deaf-recorded, consented, and licensed for commercial reuse. It sets the scope of our lexicon on purpose.
Glossary
The terms you'll meet in the first month, defined plainly. The tutor knows these too.
- Gloss
- The English label written in capitals for a sign, e.g. MOTHER. A gloss is a name for the sign, not a translation — the sign MOTHER doesn't carry English grammar, and one sign can need several English words (THANK-YOU). Capitals are the standard notation in ASL linguistics, which is why you see them throughout this site.
- Handshape
- The configuration of the fingers and thumb. ASL uses a few dozen. Many are named for the letter or number they resemble (a '5' hand, an 'A' hand); others have descriptive names (flat O, bent V, claw 5). Handshape is one of the parameters a sign is built from. Browse signs by handshape
- Parameters
- The building blocks of a sign: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual signals. William Stokoe showed in 1960 that signs decompose into these the way spoken words decompose into sounds. Change one parameter and you may have a different sign. See a sign taken apart
- Minimal pair
- Two signs that differ in exactly one parameter — MOTHER and FATHER share handshape and movement and differ only in location. Minimal pairs are how the receptive drill picks its wrong answers, so you have to read the sign instead of guessing. Try the receptive drill
- Non-manual markers
- Grammar carried by the face and body rather than the hands: eyebrow position marks question type, a head shake negates, a head tilt marks a topic, mouth shapes add degree. They are not optional expression — a sentence without them is incomplete. Lesson: asking questions
- Dominant and non-dominant hand
- Your dominant hand does most of the moving; the non-dominant (base or weak) hand either mirrors it or holds still as a surface. Left-handed signers simply mirror everything — there is no 'correct' hand.
- Initialized sign
- A sign whose handshape is the fingerspelled first letter of the English word: WATER uses a W, BLUE a B. Initialization is a documented borrowing from English (Battison 1978). Some initialized signs are fully native now; others are contested, and Deaf communities sometimes prefer non-initialized forms. WATER, an initialized sign
- Iconicity
- The degree to which a sign visibly resembles its meaning. Many signs are iconic (DRINK tips a cup), but iconic rarely means guessable — non-signers guess the meaning of most signs at chance. Iconicity is also not history: a sign can look like something today without having been created from it. Iconic, then arbitrary
- Folk etymology
- A plausible-sounding origin story that spreads because it is memorable, not because it is true — OLD as stroking a beard, TIME as pointing at a wristwatch. Every etymology here carries an evidence tier so that folklore is never presented as fact. Folk etymology, and why we flag it
- Evidence tier
- Our label for how well an etymology is supported: documented (traced in scholarship), form attested (the older form is recorded but the origin is not), iconic (a present-day resemblance), debunked (a common story that is wrong), or unknown (no reliable source — said plainly).
- Classifier
- A handshape that stands in for a class of things — a '3' hand for a vehicle, a '1' hand for a person, a flat hand for a surface — and then shows where it is and how it moves. Classifiers let signers show a car swerving or a person walking up stairs with no fixed vocabulary at all. Lesson: classifiers
- Directional verb
- A verb whose movement path shows who did what to whom. HELP moved from me toward you means 'I help you'; reversed, 'you help me'. Also called agreement or indicating verbs. Lesson: directional verbs
- Role shift
- Shifting the shoulders and eye gaze to take on a character and sign as them — ASL's way of quoting and portraying. It is central to storytelling and among the hardest receptive skills for learners. Lesson: role shift
- Fingerspelling
- Spelling an English word letter by letter with the manual alphabet, used for names, places, and words without an established sign. Some fingerspelled words have worn down into signs of their own (lexicalized fingerspelling), such as #TV. Fingerspelling trainer
- Receptive and expressive
- Receptive skill is understanding signing you watch; expressive skill is producing it. They develop separately, and learners are consistently weaker at receptive skills. Our drills and flashcards train recognition only — we do not pretend to grade your production.
- Deaf, deaf, and hard of hearing
- Capital-D Deaf refers to a cultural and linguistic identity; lowercase deaf to hearing status. 'Hard of hearing' is widely accepted. 'Hearing impaired' is generally disliked because it defines people by a deficit. When unsure, ask how someone identifies.
- CDI vocabulary
- The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories — checklists of the first words children learn. The PopSign corpus we build on covers 250 signs from the ASL version of the CDI, which is why our lexicon leans toward the words a family uses with a young child. About the corpus
- Spaced repetition (FSRS)
- Reviewing each item just before you would forget it, at growing intervals. FSRS is a modern scheduling algorithm that fits the interval to how you actually rate each card. Our flashcards use it for recognition memory. Flashcards
How we grade evidence
Every etymology in the dictionary carries one of five labels. The counts show where the lexicon stands today.
- Documented31
Derivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
- Form attested1
The older form is recorded, but the origin isn't proven.
- Iconic127
The sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
- Folk etymology — corrected2
A widely-taught story that scholarship refutes.
- Unknown19
No reliable source. We'd rather say so than invent one.
“Iconic” is the most common label and the most easily misread: it means the sign visibly resembles its meaning today, which is not a claim about how it was created. “Unknown” is a real answer, not a gap — it is the label we would rather use than repeat a tidy story we cannot source.
References
The full citations behind the short source tags on each sign.
- Shaw & Delaporte 2011historical dictionaryShaw, Emily, and Yves Delaporte. A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language. Gallaudet University Press, 2015 (research 2011). link
The field's authoritative etymological dictionary. Traces ASL signs to their French Sign Language (LSF) ancestors where evidence exists, and explicitly declines to speculate where it doesn't.
- Frishberg 1975scholarshipFrishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. link
The landmark study of how ASL signs change over time — toward symmetry, toward the hands, toward the center line, and by assimilation in compounds.
- Long 1910historical dictionaryLong, J. Schuyler. The Sign Language: A Manual of Signs. 1st ed. Washington, D.C., 1910. link
An early illustrated manual by a Deaf teacher. Attests older forms; does not usually explain origins.
- Long 1918historical dictionaryLong, J. Schuyler. The Sign Language: A Manual of Signs. 2nd ed. Gallaudet College, 1918. link
- Clark 1885historical dictionaryClark, W. P. The Indian Sign Language, with Brief Explanatory Notes. Philadelphia: L. R. Hamersly, 1885. link
Includes comparative notes on the signs used at Deaf schools of the period — which is how it dates TIME before wristwatches.
- Puybonnieux 1846historical dictionaryPuybonnieux, J.-B. Mutisme et surdité, ou Influence de la surdité native sur les facultés physiques, intellectuelles et morales. Paris, 1846.
A 19th-century French source for LSF forms that ASL inherited, including the bonnet-ribbon account of GIRL.
- Lambert 1865historical dictionaryLambert, L.-M. Le langage de la physionomie et du geste mis à la portée de tous. Paris, 1865.
An illustrated LSF dictionary by a priest at the Paris institute. Documents several signs ASL still uses.
- Ferrand c.1785historical dictionaryFerrand, Abbé Jean. Dictionnaire des sourds-muets (manuscript, c. 1785; published 1897 and 2008).
The earliest substantial LSF dictionary. Records compounds such as the ancestor of HOME.
- Battison 1978scholarshipBattison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press, 1978.
Describes how ASL borrows from English — initialized signs and lexicalized fingerspelling — and the phonological constraints on two-handed signs.
- Supalla & Newport 1978scholarshipSupalla, Ted, and Elissa Newport. "How Many Seats in a Chair? The Derivation of Nouns and Verbs in American Sign Language." In Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, edited by Patricia Siple, 91–132. Academic Press, 1978.
Shows that related nouns and verbs (SIT/CHAIR, EAT/FOOD) differ systematically in movement — nouns are smaller and repeated.
- Klima & Bellugi 1979scholarshipKlima, Edward, and Ursula Bellugi. The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, 1979.
Foundational description of ASL structure, including compounds such as BROTHER (BOY + SAME) and SISTER (GIRL + SAME).
- Cogen 1977scholarshipCogen, Cathy. "On Three Aspects of Time Expression in American Sign Language." In On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American Sign Language, edited by Lynn Friedman, 197–214. Academic Press, 1977.
Documents the ASL time line — past behind the shoulder, present at the body, future ahead — that TOMORROW, YESTERDAY, NOW and LATER move along.
- Stokoe 1960scholarshipStokoe, William C. Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers 8. University at Buffalo, 1960.
The paper that established ASL as a language with analyzable phonology: handshape, location, movement.
- ASL-LEXdatabaseSehyr, 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
Deaf-signer iconicity ratings and phonological coding for thousands of signs. When we cite ASL-LEX for iconicity, we are describing a present-day resemblance, not a historical origin.
- McCaskill et al. 2011scholarshipMcCaskill, Carolyn, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill. The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure. Gallaudet University Press, 2011. link
- PopSign 2023corpusStarner, Thad, Sean Forbes, Matthew So, David Martin, Rohit Sridhar, et al. "PopSign ASL v1.0: An Isolated American Sign Language Dataset Collected via Smartphones." NeurIPS 2023, Datasets and Benchmarks. link