Haiku

How to spell haiku

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce haiku

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does haiku mean?

1. nounA short Japanese poem of three lines following a five, seven, five syllable pattern, often about nature or a fleeting moment.

Haiku in a sentence

• The teacher asked each student to write a haiku about the changing seasons.

• Every haiku in the collection captures a single quiet image in seventeen syllables.

Where does haiku come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Haiku comes from Japanese, where it is a shortened form of the longer phrase haikai no ku, meaning roughly 'a verse of the haikai', the light or comic style of linked poetry that flourished from the sixteenth century onward. The element ku simply means a verse or stanza, while haikai carried the sense of playful or informal verse. The opening stanza of these linked sequences, called the hokku, gradually became prized as a standalone poem, and in the late nineteenth century the poet Masaoka Shiki popularised the compact name haiku for this independent three-line form built on a pattern of five, seven, and five syllables. English took the word up directly from Japanese around the start of the twentieth century, keeping its original spelling unchanged. Because it is borrowed whole, the spelling trap is purely the vowel run 'ai' followed by 'ku', which can tempt writers toward 'haiki' or 'hieku'.

How the word is built

• hai- (from haikai: comic linked verse)
• -ku (verse, stanza)