Poetry Japanese formal poetry (which was generally referred to as "waka"), and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. By the tenth century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, to the point where the originally general term "waka" ("Japanese poetry") came to be used exclusively for tanka. Tanka are still widely written today. Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the "hokku", or opening verse of a renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17 "onji", structured in
Japanese abbreviated and contracted words Station, is referred to by locals as , a contraction of , in which the alternative reading of "Na-" (名), the first character in "Nagoya", is used. In loanwords and names, the most common pattern is to take the first two morae (or kana) of each of the two words, and combine them forming a new, single word. For example, "family restaurant" or "famirī resutoran" becomes "famiresu". Yōon sounds, those sounds represented using a kana ending in "i" and a small "ya", "yu" or "yo" kana, such as "kyo" count as one mora. Japanese long vowels count as two morae,