Haiku the 5-7-5 pattern. Although the word ""on"" is sometimes translated as "syllable", one "on" is counted for a short syllable, two for an elongated vowel or doubled consonant, and one for an "n" at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word "haibun", though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four "on" in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n); and the word ""on"" itself, which English-speakers would view as a single syllable, comprises two "on": the short vowel o and the . This is illustrated by the Issa haiku below, which contains 17 "on" but only 15 syllables. Conversely, some sounds,
Haiku independently, were written in the context of renku. Shiki formally separated his new style of verse from the context of collaborative poetry. Being agnostic, he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism. Further, he discarded the term "hokku" and proposed the term "haiku" as an abbreviation of the phrase ""haikai no ku"" meaning a verse of "haikai", although the term predates Shiki by some two centuries, when it was used to mean "any" verse of haikai. Since then, "haiku" has been the term usually applied in both Japanese and English to all independent haiku, irrespective of their date of