Haiku a phrase in the remaining 12 "on" (it may not be apparent from the English translation of the Issa that the first five "on" mean "Edo's rain"). In comparison with English verse typically characterized by syllabic meter, Japanese verse counts sound units known as ""on"" or morae. Traditional haiku consist of 17 "on", in three phrases of five, seven and five "on" respectively. Among contemporary poems "teikei" ( fixed form) haiku continue to use the 5-7-5 pattern while "jiyuritsu" ( free form) haiku do not. One of the examples below illustrates that traditional haiku masters were not always constrained by
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