A Practical Look at Elaine Costello's ASL Dictionary
The American Sign Language Dictionary Elaine Costello edition came out of a time when proper ASL references were nearly impossible to find. Most available materials either reduced signs to awkward illustrations or treated sign language as just another way to write English in your hands. Costello's work attempted to do something different. It approached ASL as a visual-gestural language with its own grammar and structure, rather than a code for spoken English. She was the lead editor and primary contributor for the Prentice-Hall publication that first appeared in 1975. The dictionary drew on her years of work at the Texas School for the Deaf and interactions with Deaf communities around the country. It was one of the first American ASL dictionaries aimed at both Deaf and hearing audiences, and it remained in print through multiple editions.
How the American Sign Language Dictionary Elaine Costello Is Organized
The dictionary uses a handshape index system. Instead of organizing signs purely by English equivalent, it groups them by the shape and movement of the hand. This is actually more useful than you might expect. When you already know a sign partially or are trying to figure out the correct hand configuration, searching by handshape cuts through a lot of dead ends. Each entry shows a line drawing of the sign, notes the handshape, location, and movement, and provides the English gloss. The entries are arranged alphabetically by English headword. That means you look up the English word first, then find the recommended sign representation. The drawings are fairly detailed for their era. They show palm orientation, finger configuration, and directional movement using standard linguistic notation conventions. Here's something most people miss: the dictionary includes non-manual signals in several entries. Facial expressions and body movements that accompany signs aren't just decorative. In ASL, a raised eyebrow versus a furrowed brow can change a question into a statement or shift the meaning of a verb entirely. Costello flagged these in a number of entries, though not consistently across the entire book. That inconsistency is worth noting because it means you can't rely on the dictionary alone to teach you the full grammatical picture.
I ran into a specific problem once while working with a student who was preparing for a signing interview. He kept getting marked down on classifier usage. The dictionary has classifier entries, but they're scattered across different sections with minimal cross-referencing. There's no clear entry for "classifier predicates" as a category. You have to already know what you're looking for to find it. My workaround was to build a separate reference sheet mapping common classifier types to their entries in the book. It took about two hours to put together but saved us countless flips through pages during study sessions.
What the Dictionary Gets Right
The core strength of this reference is its commitment to treating ASL signs as distinct lexical items rather than translations of English words. Many signs that appear in the dictionary have no direct English equivalent and are presented with notes about their actual usage. The section on spatial grammar and role-shifting was ahead of its time for a dictionary publication. Another thing people overlook: the movement descriptions use precise terminology. Terms like "wrist rotation," "open five bend," and "finger flick" are used consistently throughout. This precision matters because ASL has phonological components similar to sounds in spoken languages. Handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual markers are the five phonological parameters. When a dictionary gets these right in its descriptions, it helps learners understand that signs are built from component parts rather than being arbitrary gestures. The dictionary also includes a section on ASL vocabulary by topic. This is useful for building thematic word sets. A beginner might learn five signs related to food in one sitting instead of jumping randomly between unrelated categories.
Where It Falls Short
Let me be blunt about the limitations. This is a 1975 reference. The sign repertoire it documents reflects American Sign Language as it was understood and signed at that time. Some signs have shifted or been replaced. Newer signs for technology, social concepts, and contemporary Deaf culture are simply absent. If you're using this dictionary to prepare for interactions in a modern Deaf community, you'll notice gaps immediately. The line drawings, while serviceable, can't capture the three-dimensional nature of signing. Palm orientation is especially tricky to convey on a flat page. Two signs that differ only in which way the palm faces will look identical in the illustrations. You need a video resource alongside any printed dictionary to properly learn this distinction. Without motion, you're learning half the sign. The English glosses themselves can be misleading. The dictionary lists one English equivalent per sign in most cases, but many ASL signs map to multiple English words depending on context. A single gloss can lock you into a false understanding of the sign's range. For example, the sign for "help" might be glossed as "help" but actually covers a semantic range closer to "assist," "aid," "support," or even "accommodate" depending on the situation. The dictionary doesn't always make these nuances clear.
If you're serious about learning ASL, you should pair this with newer resources. The American Sign Language Dictionary Elaine Costello remains historically important and pedagogically useful for foundational vocabulary, but it shouldn't be your only reference. Modern video-based dictionaries like those from the California State University program or the ASL-Ex platform offer current signs with actual motion and multiple examples in context. For students who want to continue beyond the basics, I'd recommend supplementing with Oxford's "Dictionary of American Sign Language on Computer Disk" by William Concepts or the online ASL-LEX database for research-grade sign data. The Costello dictionary works best as a starting point, not a.
