Free instrument
An instrument for the single breath — three lines in, syllable counts out, plus notes on kigo, kireji, imagery, and any rewrite that preserves your intent.
Old pond —
“Ya” (や) forces a pause, severing the pond’s stillness from the action that follows. In English: a dash, colon, or hard line break.
a frog jumps in,
The frog is a spring kigo — one word anchors the whole image in a season.
sound of water.
Counted in Japanese on — sound units the English syllable only approximates. The 5-7-5 ledger is a convention, not a law.
1 free run left today · Sign up for 2/day.
01What we check beyond syllables
Three lines of five, seven, and five — a convention borrowed, imperfectly, from the Japanese on.
The on is a sound unit roughly equivalent to a syllable but not identical — which is why some poets and translators argue against strict 17-syllable English haiku. Either way, 5-7-5 is what most readers and editors expect, and that's what this instrument checks.
A tether to the earth — without a seasonal anchor, three short lines drift free of time.
'Cherry blossom' for spring, 'cicada' for summer, 'maple leaves' for autumn, 'snow' for winter. The kigo grounds the moment in a lived natural cycle, giving the small image cosmic weight. Modern haiku often loosen this rule, but a kigo is still the easiest way to make a haiku feel like one.
The architectural pivot — a pause that forces two images to collide.
In Japanese it's a particle (ya, kana, keri); in English it's usually a dash, colon, or line break that signals a pause. The juxtaposition is the engine of the haiku — without it you have a description; with it, a small revelation.
02Questions
Traditional haiku do — a kigo (seasonal reference) anchors the moment in a natural cycle. Modern English haiku often skip it. The Checker will flag whether your candidate has a clear kigo without docking points for omitting one; if the rest of the haiku works, it works.
A 'cutting word' — the pivot that splits a haiku into two contrasting images that resonate against each other. In Japanese, particles like ya, kana, and keri serve this role. In English, it's usually a dash, colon, or strong line break. Without juxtaposition, a haiku reads as flat description.
Strictly speaking, no — Japanese on (sound units) aren't identical to English syllables, and many serious haiku poets in English write shorter (often 11-14 syllables total). But 5-7-5 is the convention most readers expect, and it's what schools teach, so we check it.
The live syllable counter uses a naive vowel-group algorithm — accurate ~95% of the time for common English words. Tricky words like 'fire' (1 syllable in some dialects, 2 in others) or 'hour' may be miscounted. Sonnet 4.6 sanity-checks the count and will flag disagreement.
Yes — 2 tool runs per visitor per day, shared across all Storgy tools. Resets every 24 hours. No signup, no account.
Each check lives at a permanent URL. Bookmark it, send it to a workshop, or post it. The page is reachable to anyone with the link.
No — and won't. Haiku is one of the few forms where the tradition explicitly resists ghostwriting; the value is in the discipline of writing one yourself. The Checker tells you whether yours holds together.
This tool only checks haiku. Senryu (similar form, human-foible focus) would mostly pass too, since the structural rules overlap. Tanka (5-7-5-7-7) and longer forms aren't supported here.
03Correlated instruments
The same counting engine, unconstrained — any word, line, or stanza, instant and unlimited.
Inst. 02Draft in any classic form — though the haiku tradition would rather you wrote your own.
ArchiveThe full guide — history, masters, and what 5-7-5 actually translates from.
Seventeen syllables, honestly counted.
Syllable counts computed deterministically; commentary by Claude Sonnet 4.6. Free for fair-use educational study.