Fingerspelling. What is its role?

Fingerspelling is a way of representing words from a spoken language (that has a written form).

Fingerspelling uses separate handshapes for each letter of the word from the spoken language writing system.

Fingerspelling is a small part of ASL. It is used for names of people, places and things when they do not have a name sign or to introduce a name sign.

In general, fingerspelling is also used for months of the year. Those words will not be found in the dictionary because they don't depend on the ASL-phabet.