Page "American Sign Language" Paragraph 34

In the 1960s linguist William Stokoe created the first writing system for a sign language, the so-called Stokoe notation, which he designed specifically for ASL.

It is alphabetic, with a letter or diacritic for every phonemic ( distinctive ) hand shape, orientation, motion, and position, though it lacks any representation of facial expression, and is better suited for individual words than for extended passages of text.

Stokoe used it for his 1965 A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, the first dictionary with entries in ASL — that is, the first dictionary which one could use to look up a sign without first knowing its conventional gloss in English.