How common is a sign? How is it built? Does it look like what it means? ASL-LEX answers those questions for thousands of ASL signs, in one free, searchable place. It started with about 1,000 signs and grew to 2,723, and it has quietly become a foundation for sign language research and technology.

Imagine being able to look up an unfamiliar ASL sign by simply demonstrating it to your device. Whether you're a fluent signer or just beginning to learn, this type of interaction could transform accessibility in technology—think of ASL-compatible assistants like Siri or Alexa or search engines that understand signed queries. This vision is one step closer to reality thanks to the ASL Citizen dataset, a collaborative project we worked on with Microsoft Research, University of

A dataset to train computers to recognize isolated signs.