Haiku in English four lines (sometimes known as "haiqua") or longer have been written, some of them "vertical haiku" with only a word or two per line. These poems mimic the vertical printed form of Japanese haiku. The translator Nobuyuki Yuasa considered four lines more appropriate in his translations, being closest to the natural conversational rhythm of the colloquial language of haiku, also that three lines did not carry the weight of hokku and found it impossible to use 'three lines' consistently for his translations. The contemporary poet John Martone has written a vast number of vertical haiku. Haiku have also appeared in
Japanese abbreviated and contracted words be commonly used, or they may be specific to a particular group of people. For example, the is known as by its employees, but this terminology is not familiar to most Japanese. Japanese words are spelled using characters that represent syllables (morae), rather than individual phonetic units (phonemes) as in the English alphabet. These characters are compiled into two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. Japanese also makes extensive use of adopted Chinese characters, or kanji, which may be pronounced with one or more syllables. Therefore, when a word or phrase is abbreviated, it does not take the form of initials, but