Sign Language Word Search
The words of American Sign Language and the people who shaped it: fingerspelling and the manual alphabet, the handshape, palm, movement and location of each sign, the eyebrows that carry grammar, and the names Gallaudet and Clerc.
ASL began in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher from the school for the deaf in Paris, opened the first permanent school for deaf children in the United States. Clerc brought French Sign Language with him, and it mixed with the signs his students already used at home. That is why ASL is closer to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, which spells with two hands where ASL uses one.
For a long time scholars treated signing as gesture. In 1960 William Stokoe, an English professor at Gallaudet College in Washington, published a study showing that ASL is a full language with its own grammar, built from parts like handshape, location and movement. The face does part of the work: raised eyebrows turn a statement into a yes-or-no question, and a name sign is given to a person by the deaf community, not chosen for yourself.
Free Sign Language Word Search Online Game
Play the Sign Language word search in your browser, on your own or head to head against a friend in real time. Nothing to install and no account needed – send someone the link and you are both looking at the same grid.
Sign Language Word Search Printable Puzzles
Three sheets to choose from, free to print or download as a PDF. Pick a difficulty below, or open the printable Sign Language word search page to see all three together, generate a fresh grid, and check the full word list.
Hard
15x15 grid, up to 23 hidden words
Print or Download pdfMedium
12x12 grid, up to 15 hidden words
Print or Download pdfEasy
10x10 grid, 5 words across and down
Print or Download pdf
Puzzle Vocabulary Words
Below you can see all possible words that the topic Sign Language has.
Depends on difficulty level you select in the game amount of words hidden in the puzzle will be different.
In Easy game you have to find up to 5 words, medium game can have up to 15 words and hard puzzle can have up to 23 words.
Every time you start a new game - our word search generator will pick random words to build the puzzle.
- Alphabet
- ASL
- Bilingual
- Captions
- Classifier
- Clerc
- Community
- Culture
- Deaf
- Dialect
- Expression
- Eye Contact
- Eyebrows
- Facial
- Family
- Fingerspelling
- Friend
- Gallaudet
- Gesture
- Grammar
- Handshape
- Hearing
- Hello
- Interpreter
- Lipreading
- Location
- Mouth
- Movement
- Name Sign
- Palm
- Please
- Sorry
- Space
- Stokoe
- Thank You
- Thumb
- Visual
- Wave
- Wrist
- Yes