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
Haiku in English the one-line form can create a variety of ambiguities involving the perceived placement of cuts and the grammatical status of individual words, thereby allowing for multiple readings of the same haiku. A variation of the format breaks the line at the "caesura" or pause. At its most minimal, a single word may occasionally be claimed to be a haiku: The first was printed alone on an otherwise blank page and arguably only "works" in that context. The second example is an allusion to the first and also depends on its placement at the center of a haiku collection. Haiku of