The BSL SignBank Dictionary
The BSL SignBank Dictionary has two primary sources: the BSL Corpus, and the British Sign Language/English Dictionary (Brien 1992). Many signs are found in both. Some are found in the BSL Corpus but not in Brien 1992. Some are found in Brien 1992 but not (yet) in the BSL Corpus: these might be obsolete signs that are no longer in use, or they are signs that we have not yet come across in the BSL Corpus.
The current version of BSL SignBank public data includes over 2500 signs from roughly 12 hours (50,000 sign tokens) from BSL Corpus conversation data from Bristol, Birmingham, London and Manchester, and from the “What’s your sign?” task from all 249 signers in those regions plus Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and Newcastle. As work on the BSL Corpus continues, future updates will include more signs from more regions and tasks in the BSL Corpus. We also aim to include new proposed signs from the deaf community where appropriate.
For more details about how BSL SignBank was created, see Cormier et al. (2012), Fenlon, Schembri, Rentelis, Vinson & Cormier (2014), and Fenlon, Cormier & Schembri (2015).
For information about the regional signs presented in BSL SignBank, see Stamp et al. (2014).
How To Use the Dictionary
There are two ways of searching for signs.
1. Browse by two of the major sign features in BSL, i.e. handshape or location. Click on "Search by Sign Features" and pick a handshape and/or a location to see signs that match. Note that for signs which involve a change in handshape or change in location, this search uses the feature at the start of the sign. So if you choose signs produced at the eye, it will return signs that are located at (or start at) the eye.
2. Type an English word in the "Search using English" box, then click on Search or just press Enter on your keyboard. You will then be taken to the sign (or signs) that might be associated with that English word. If more than one English word matches what you have typed, you will then see a list of words to choose from: click on the word you wanted. If there is no match, try typing a simpler form of the word (e.g. "walk" rather than "walked"; "shine" rather than "shone"; "apple" rather than "apples"), or just try typing the first few letters of the word rather than the whole word.
Academic researchers can also register with SignBank to request to access advanced features, including more detailed search abilities by sign features.
Permissions and licensing
The data and videos provided by this site are provided to the general public for non-commercial use only. The copyright is held by the Deafness, Cognition & Language Research Centre at University College London.
Please do not create external links directly to the video files, or attempt to scrape any data from this site without written permission from us. External links to the URLs for individual sign pages are permitted, but please remember that BSL SignBank is a living dictionary: any data or metadata might be updated in future.
The data provided by this site are not available for licensing or bulk redistribution. We only share these materials with collaborators as part of funded research projects, to ensure they are used appropriately and with the necessary linguistic context. This ensures that use is guided, supported, and academically appropriate. Without collaboration, there is a significant risk of the data being misused or misunderstood. There have been previous cases where SignBank materials were used without permission in ways that caused confusion or misrepresentation of BSL.
If you are looking for alternative resources, you may find the BSL Corpus data helpful. Portions of this data are open access and can be freely used, and you can also request registered researcher access for further materials.
Please contact us if you require further information or have a proposal for collaboration.
References
Brien, D. (Ed.). (1992). Dictionary of British Sign Language/English. Boston: Faber & Faber.
Cormier, K., Fenlon, J., Johnston, T., Rentelis, R., Schembri, A., Rowley, K., Adam, R., Woll, B. (2012). From corpus to lexical database to online dictionary: Issues in annotation of the BSL Corpus and the development of BSL SignBank In O. Crasborn, E. Efthimiou, E. Fotinea, T. Hanke, J. Kristoffersen, & J. Mesch (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on the representation and processing of sign languages: Interactions between corpus and lexicon [workshop part of 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012, Istanbul, Turkey] (pp. 7-12). Paris: ELRA.
Fenlon, J., Schembri, A., Rentelis, R., Vinson, D., & Cormier, K. (2014). Using conversational data to determine lexical frequency in British Sign Language: The influence of text type. Lingua, 143, 187-202. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.02.003
Fenlon, J., Cormier, K., & Schembri, A. (2015). Building BSL SignBank: The lemma dilemma revisited. International Journal of Lexicography, 28(2), 169-206. doi:10.1093/ijl/ecv008
Stamp, R., Schembri, A., Fenlon, J., Rentelis, R., Woll, B., & Cormier, K. (2014). Lexical variation and change in British Sign Language. PLoS ONE, 9(4), e94053. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094053