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
Japanese pitch accent that of Kōchi in Shikoku. Japanese pitch accent also varies in how it interacts with syllables and morae. Kagoshima is a purely syllabic dialect, while Osaka is moraic. For example, the low-tone unaccented noun "shimbun" 'newspaper' is in Kagoshima, with the high tone spread across the entire final syllable "bun," but in Osaka it is , with the high tone restricted to the final mora "n". In Tokyo, accent placement is constrained by the syllable, though the downstep occurs between the morae of that syllable. That is, a stressed syllable in Tokyo dialect, as in "kai" 'shell' or "san" 'divining