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
Mora (linguistics) moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word "mōra", the "ō" is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ, corresponding here to , each containing one mora. Such scholars also argue that the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final "n" is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", 日本, has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ("Nihon") and one with four ("Nippon"). In