Haiku in English with the one-line vertical column in which Japanese haiku are often printed, was lent legitimacy principally by three people: The single-line haiku usually contains fewer than seventeen syllables. A caesura (pause) may be appropriate, dictated by sense or speech rhythm (following the traditional Japanese tradition of a break, marked by the Kireji), and usually little or no punctuation. This form was used by John Wills and, more recently, has been practiced by poets such as M. Kettner, Janice Bostok, Jim Kacian, Chris Gordon, Scott Metz, Stuart Quine, John Barlow, and many others. As the last two examples in particular illustrate,
On (Japanese prosody) transliterated into hiragana. In cases where a hiragana is represented by a pair of symbols each pair (or "digraph" e.g. "kyo" (きょ)) equates to a single "on". When viewed this way, the term ""ji"" ("character") is used in Japanese. In English-language discussions of Japanese poetry, the more familiar word "syllable" is sometimes used. Although the use of "syllable" is inaccurate, it often happens that the syllable count and the "on" count match in Japanese-language haiku. The disjunction between syllables and "on" becomes clearer when counting sounds in English-language versions of Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku in English. An English