The Gallaudet Dictionary Of American Sign Language

Getting Started With ASL Reference Materials

The Gallaudet Dictionary Of American Sign Language is one of those reference works that shows up constantly in beginner syllabi and Deaf studies courses. It is not the only option, and for certain use cases it is genuinely frustrating. But if you are building a working vocabulary, it has utility that some newer digital tools still do not match. Here is how to get the most out of it without losing your mind. Published in 2005 by Gallaudet University Press, this is a two-volume printed dictionary edited by Dennis Brent, Vicki Tolar Burke, and Clayton Valli. It contains roughly 6,000 signs with line drawings for handshape, orientation, and location, plus brief glosses and usage notes. The dictionary is organized by sign gloss, not by handshape class or spatial region, which is a deliberate editorial choice that affects how you search it. There is also a companion DVD-ROM with video demonstrations of many of the entries. I picked up the second edition around 2011 when I was helping a family learn ASL for a newly deaf child. The printed format sounded straightforward enough. Within three weeks I realized that browsing by gloss is not the same thing as looking up a word in an English dictionary. ASL does not map one-to-one onto English. A lot of the frustration people have with this book comes from expecting it to work like a translation tool. It does not. It works like a vocabulary index, and you need to know the gloss for the sign you are trying to find.

The DVD is worth your time. The line drawings in the text are accurate but sometimes hard to parse when you are new to manual phonology. Watching the actual signing on the disc resolved more confusion in a single session than flipping through the illustrated plates all afternoon. My workaround back then was to open the book on one side of the desk and the laptop playing the DVD on the other, jumping back and forth rather than trying to memorize anything statically.

How To Use It Without Wasting Your Time

Start by understanding manual phonology basics. Every ASL sign can be broken down into five parameters: handshape, palm orientation, location, movement, and nonmanual signals. The dictionary entries are coded using a standardized handshape chart developed by Valli and his colleagues. If you do not already know how to read that chart, spend an evening going through the front matter of Volume 1. It will save you hours later. I have watched people try to find signs without this step, which makes them flip pages aimlessly for twenty minutes before they give up. The entries are sorted alphabetically by gloss. Gloss is the written English approximation of the sign. Some signs have multiple glosses depending on regional variation or dialect. That is not a flaw in the dictionary. It is a feature of how ASL actually exists. A sign for WATER might be filed under WATER in one entry and RIVER in another, because the same handshape and movement can carry both meanings in different contexts. If you only search one gloss, you will miss the other. Here is a practical edge case I ran into during the period I was helping that family. The child's family wanted to look up a sign for GRANDMOTHER, and every attempt to find it in the index failed. I eventually tracked down the entry under MY MOTHERS MOTHER, which is the gloss used in that dictionary. The sign itself uses a modified G-handshape near the chin with a downward sweep. The book did not cross-reference it from GRANDMOTHER because the editorial convention was to list the full gloss chain, not abbreviations. If you are searching by a shortened or colloquial term, you will hit dead ends repeatedly. The workaround is to work backward from the meaning cluster rather than the single word you expect.

Known Limitations And Where It Fails

This dictionary is dated. It reflects the lexical inventory available at the time of publication, which means signs that became widespread after 2005 are absent. Regional variants from the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and parts of the UK that emerged in the 2010s are not represented. If you are working with a community that uses those variants heavily, the dictionary will not cover them. I have encountered users who assumed the dictionary was definitive because Gallaudet is the most well-known institution for deaf education. It is not definitive. It is a snapshot. The line drawings are helpful but not sufficient on their own. Without video, you cannot fully capture the timing, the transition movements between handshapes, or the facial grammar that accompanies certain signs. The DVD helps, but it is limited to the entries that were included on disc, which is a subset of the total. You will find entries in the text that have no corresponding video. That gap is real and it matters when you are trying to distinguish between two signs that look nearly identical on paper but move differently in practice. Annoyingly, the book lacks a comprehensive index of alternative glosses or sign names. The glosses themselves are somewhat idiosyncratic. Some signs are indexed under their literal English translation while others use descriptive phrases. There is no consistent logic that is easy to reverse-engineer. I recommend keeping a secondary notebook where you write down the alternate glosses you encounter. After a few months of using the dictionary, the pattern becomes predictable enough that you stop hitting the same walls repeatedly.

Better Alternatives For Different Goals

If your goal is quick vocabulary lookup, SignLanguage.Pitt.edu is freely available online and updated regularly. It covers a broader range of signs and includes video for nearly every entry. If you need academic rigor or are doing research that requires a citable printed source, the Gallaudet dictionary remains useful. For conversational fluency, pair it with a signing partner or a structured class. A dictionary alone will get you so far, and past a certain point it actively reinforces fossilized errors because you have nobody to correct your production. The second edition remains in print and sells for around seventy dollars for the set. Used copies exist on eBay and AbeBooks at lower prices but condition varies. The DVD-ROM in older copies can fail to play on modern systems due to compatibility issues. If you are buying used, test the disc before completing the purchase or plan to rely primarily on the text. I spent an afternoon trying to get a twenty-year-old DVD to read on a laptop that did not support the original media format. It was not productive. Use the book as a reference, not a textbook. Read the manual phonology section first. Keep a gloss notebook. Cross-reference with online video sources. Accept that it will not solve every lookup problem and move on when it does not. That approach turned it from a frustrating obstacle into something actually useful for me over the years.