ASL: "year-over-year"


"Year over year refers to the mathematical process of comparing one year of data to the previous year of data."
Source: https://investinganswers.com/dictionary/y/year-over-year

While we could sign the concept year-over-year using various combinations of signs or fingerspelling -- I would suggest to you that more often than not "context" allows us to sign the term year-over-year by simply signing "every-YEAR"
Sample: https://youtu.be/ni0cj_Uva2I

To support that idea (of just using the "every-YEAR" sign) consider this example of real life usage provided by Merriam-https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/year-over-year :

"The society argued in the Journal of Forestry last year that this simple accounting is reasonable in the United States, where forest inventories have increased year over year since the 1930s.
-- Peter Fairley, IEEE Spectrum, April 2012"

In the example above due to the context of the sentence the fastest and most simple way to sign "year over year" would be to use the "every-YEAR / annually" sign (which, due to context takes on the meaning of year over year).

Sure, if for some reason the specific English terminology "year over year" needs to be understood (as in a student taking an English-based test later on in the semester) then be more specific in your signing including signing YEAR fs-OVER YEAR combined with expansion (such as signing YEAR COMPARE YEAR time-RANGE, time-RANGE) and later in the conversation shortening the concept to fs-YOY.
 



Notes:
The same approach applies to "week over week." In context it will likely be fine to just sign "every-WEEK." (The version that repeats the sign week. Some people write that as: WEEK-WEEK, or WEEK+).
In strong context and repeated usage it may become more efficient to eventually reduce the term to fingerspelling "WOW" -- however use a small bit of caution in fingerspelling WOW (for "week over week") due to the potential for the audience misunderstanding the spelling to mean the exclamation "Wow!" -- since WOW (the exclamation) has a fingerspelled version. This shouldn't be an issue when communicating with a skilled signer though because the exclamation WOW! is strongly inflected with facial expressions and tends to be lexicalized with added movement.

 






 
Notes: