In our paper we present a method for the automatic generation of single German Sign Language glosses from German words. Glosses are often used as a textual description of signs when transcribing Sign Language video data. For a machine translation system from German to German Sign Language we apply glosses as an intermediate notational system. Then the automatic generation from given German words is presented. This novel approach takes the orthographic similarities between glosses and written words into account. The obtained experimental results show the feasibility of our methods for word classes like adverbs, adjectives and verbs with up to 80% correctly generated glosses.