Haiku

Haiku (俳句) is a type of Japanese poetry. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century.

The traditional hokku usually was written in six verses or more or less 5, 7, 5 syllables and they had to follow (on-ji). The Japanese word cow, meaning "sound", corresponds to a mora, a phonetic unit similar but not identical to the syllable of a language such as English. A haiku has a special season word (the kigo) to represent the season in which the poem is set, or a reference to the natural world.

Haiku usually breaks in three parts, called kireji, normally placed at the end of the first five or second seven morae. In Japanese, there are actual kireji words. In English, kireji is often replaced with commas, hyphens, elipses, or breaks in the haiku. Japanese haiku are normally written in one line, while English language haiku are traditionally separated into three lines.

In Japanese, nouns do not have different singular and plural forms, so "haiku" is used as both a singular and plural noun in English as well.


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