Baby Sign Language Dictionary

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We are so pleased that you have found your way to our interactive, baby sign language dictionary! In this dictionary you will not only find signs in American Sign Language for words you might want to teach your baby, toddler or preschooler, but also signs for words your little one may want to communicate with you about! The words were selected based on a variety of input ranging from requests we receive from parents, teachers and caregivers attending our classes and workshops to suggestions from our site visitors. The Baby Sign Language dictionary currently contains over 600 words and is growing by leaps and bounds as we are adding and updating this section almost daily. If you have a suggestion for a word not contained herein, please feel free to submit your request to us via our contact page. We will make every effort to include it in the dictionary as soon as we can.

About the Sign Language Dictionary

We have done our very best to make our baby sign language dictionary as easy to use as possible; however, here are a few things to keep in mind as you search and view the videos.

First, we are located in the southeast region of the United States - Florida, specifically. Our ASL consultant, JoyAnn, who is a Certified Teacher of the Deaf and an ASL Instructor, is originally from New York. She is also fourth-generation Deaf. That said, while all the signs in the video dictionary are either modeled or approved for accuracy by JoyAnn, you may see some of the words signed unlike how it is done in your geographic area. This is not an uncommon occurrence with a natural, living language. Just as we have regional dialects and word variances in English, e.g., soda, pop, coke, for a carbonated cola flavored soft drink, the same applies to ASL. Individual regions of the US and Canada may sign a word differently than in other areas. In instances where we know of multiple sign variations, we have either:

written a description of how you might see the sign made -- this is especially true in instances where the variation(s) differs only slightly from our video demonstration, or
created supplemental video(s) which can be viewed by clicking on the VAR link(s) provided in the Variations subheading.

Signed English words are sometimes used with Baby Sign Language, if a word in our dictionary is Signed English, that will be noted in the description.

ASL uses signs to portray concepts, not English words. If the sign can be used to convey multiple English words, the ones that are most common and useful to parents, caregivers, and teachers will be listed in the "Other Words Used For This Sign" subheading.

For those of you with small children who are interested in seeing how a sign may look when signed by a child, we have been able to get either our own little signer or another little one to model some of the more common signs. If a word contains a supplemental child signing video, you will see a link to it in the description.

Our sign language videos do not contain sound so you will not hear us describing how to produce the signs. This is because JoyAnn is also one of our main signing models and she uses ASL, not spoken English, to communicate. There are some other fabulous baby signing sites on the web that contain video dictionaries with verbal descriptions of the signs. One of our favorites is by My Smart Hands. Please check out their website if you want to hear sign descriptions along with the video.

We have done our best to capture how a sign is produced on our videos; despite our best efforts, you might still need to refer to the written description of the sign. Some of the descriptions may refer to ASL handshapes. We are in the process of creating a page that will show you how to make these handshapes as well as all the letters of the ASL manual alphabet. It will eventually be a pdf file that you can download and print out to use as a quick reference guide. In the meantime, we suggest you visit ASL University to see their wonderful ASL handshape page.

We hope you enjoy looking through our baby sign language dictionary. Once again, please feel free to submit a word request to us via our contact page if you have a suggestion for a word not contained here and we will do our best to include it in the dictionary as soon as possible. Click the picture below to be directed to the Baby Sign Language Dictionary!

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