Sign language doesn’t have a single, universally adopted writing system the way spoken English has the alphabet. But several practical methods exist for putting signs on paper or screen, ranging from simple English-word shortcuts to full visual scripts that capture every handshape and movement. The method you choose depends on your goal: quick notes for a class, academic research, or creating readable documents for deaf communities.
Glossing: The Quick Shorthand
Glossing is the most common way students and researchers write down sign language, and it’s the simplest to learn. Instead of inventing new symbols, you use English words written in capital letters to represent each sign. The word BOOK means the sign for “book.” A phrase like LOOK-AT uses a hyphen to show that two English words together represent a single sign. This system is standard in linguistics textbooks and ASL classrooms.
A typical gloss has multiple lines stacked on top of each other. The main line shows the signs themselves in small capitals. A line above can indicate where the signer’s eyes are directed, which matters because gaze often carries grammatical meaning in sign languages. Additional lines can mark facial expressions, raised eyebrows, or head tilts that change a statement into a question or add emphasis. These non-manual signals are written above the signs they accompany, usually with a line spanning the relevant words.
Glossing is fast and accessible, but it has a serious limitation: it borrows from a spoken language. Writing HAPPY doesn’t tell you what your hand looks like, where it moves, or how your face should look. Two people reading the same gloss need to already know the sign language being described. Think of it more like shorthand notes than true writing.
SignWriting: A Visual Script
SignWriting is the closest thing sign languages have to a full alphabet. Developed by Valerie Sutton, it uses visual symbols arranged in vertical columns, read top to bottom, to represent exactly what a signer’s body does. Unlike glossing, someone who learns SignWriting can read a sign they’ve never seen before, just as you can sound out an unfamiliar English word.
The system organizes all its symbols into seven major categories:
- Hand symbols show your handshape and the orientation of your palm and fingers.
- Movement symbols describe how your hands travel through space, including direction, speed, and path.
- Contact symbols indicate when and how your hands touch each other or another part of your body.
- Head symbols represent a circle for the head plus modifiers for facial expressions, mouth shapes, and eye gaze.
- Torso and limb symbols mark shoulder, arm, and body positions.
- Dynamic symbols add information about the manner of movement, such as whether two hands move simultaneously or alternate.
- Punctuation works similarly to written English, marking sentence boundaries and pauses.
A single written sign in SignWriting looks like a small diagram. You’ll see a head circle at the top, hand symbols positioned where they appear relative to the body, and arrows or lines showing motion. The result reads almost like a stick-figure snapshot of the signer, which makes it surprisingly intuitive once you learn the basic shapes. Most people can start writing simple signs within a few hours of practice, though fluency takes longer.
How to Start Learning SignWriting
Begin with the five basic handshapes: a fist, a flat hand, a pointing finger, a curved hand, and a spread hand. Each has a distinct symbol, and variations (like bending a knuckle or extending a thumb) are shown by small modifications to that base shape. Once you recognize the handshapes, learn the six basic arrow types for movement: up, down, left, right, toward the signer, and away from the signer.
From there, practice by writing signs you already know. Pick ten common signs, watch yourself in a mirror, and diagram what you see: where are your hands, what shape are they, and how do they move? Compare your attempts to entries in SignPuddle, a free online platform at SignWriting.org that functions as both a dictionary and a writing tool. SignPuddle lets you look up signs, build new written signs using a visual editor, and browse texts that other users have created in dozens of sign languages worldwide.
SignWriting works for any sign language, not just ASL. The same symbols describe handshapes and movements regardless of whether you’re writing British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, or Brazilian Sign Language. The symbols represent physical actions, not meanings tied to a particular language.
Digital Tools and Typing Sign Language
SignWriting has been encoded in Unicode, the universal standard that lets computers display text in every script from Arabic to Chinese. The SignWriting block contains 672 characters, starting at code point 1D800 and running through 1DAAF. This means SignWriting symbols can theoretically appear in any software that supports Unicode, be copied and pasted between apps, and be searched electronically.
In practice, most people write SignWriting using dedicated tools rather than typing Unicode characters directly. SignPuddle’s online editor is the most widely used option. It provides a drag-and-drop interface where you select hand symbols, position them relative to a head circle, and add movement arrows. The platform also supports multilingual labels, so you can tag each sign with its equivalent word in any spoken language.
For more technical applications, researchers use formats like SiGML, an XML-based system that translates written notation into instructions a computer avatar can animate. You write a sign using a phonetic notation system (describing handshape, location, movement, and orientation as coded values), and software converts that description into a 3D animated figure performing the sign. This pipeline is used in projects building automatic sign language translation, where text input needs to produce visible signing output on screen.
Other Notation Systems
SignWriting and glossing are the two most accessible options, but they aren’t the only ones. HamNoSys (the Hamburg Notation System) is a phonetic transcription system used heavily in academic research. It assigns a unique symbol to every possible handshape, location, and movement, making it extremely precise but harder to learn than SignWriting. HamNoSys reads left to right like text rather than using SignWriting’s spatial layout, which makes it more practical for typed documents but less visually intuitive.
Stokoe notation, developed in the 1960s, was the first system to treat sign language as linguistically structured rather than pantomime. It uses letter-like symbols arranged in a fixed order (location, then handshape, then movement) to describe each sign. While historically important and still referenced in older research, Stokoe notation has largely been replaced by HamNoSys in academic settings and by SignWriting in community use.
Choosing the Right Method
If you’re taking an ASL class and need to jot down vocabulary, glossing is all you need. Write the English equivalent in capitals, add hyphens for multi-word glosses, and note any important facial expressions above the line. You can start immediately with no special tools.
If you want to write sign language in a way that actually captures what the signs look like, learn SignWriting. It takes more upfront effort, but it’s the only widely used system that a reader can decode without already knowing the sign language. It’s also the only system with a real community of everyday users writing stories, poems, and educational materials.
If you’re building software, doing computational linguistics, or need machine-readable notation, HamNoSys and SiGML are the standard tools. They’re designed for precision and computer processing rather than human readability, so they’re overkill for personal notes but essential for research and technology development.