Loading page
About this tool
Get a real seasonal kigo, a juxtaposition to build on and a suggested cut point, plus a live 5-7-5 syllable check on your draft.
A haiku prompt generator built on the two things that actually define the form: a kigo (季語, season word) drawn from the Japanese saijiki, and a toriawase — two images set against each other and separated by a cut. It serves real season words for all five saijiki seasons, including New Year, and pairs each with a grounding image, a contrasting image and a suggested cut point, then counts the syllables in your draft line by line against 5-7-5.
Open Haiku Prompt Generator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Provide your input — an image, text, or data.
Let the tool analyze or generate the result.
Review, refine, and reuse the output wherever you need it.
Every kigo is a standard almanac entry with its kanji, romaji and what it actually signals.
Two images plus a cut position give you a structure, not just a topic.
Counts per line against 5-7-5 and says plainly when a shorter English haiku is still publishable.
A kigo is a season word — a term that traditionally locates a haiku in one of the five seasons of the Japanese saijiki: New Year, spring, summer, autumn and winter. Some are obvious, like snow for winter, and some are conventions you have to learn: the moon on its own is autumn, and a frog is spring.
In Japanese the count is 17 on (sound units), usually 5-7-5, but a Japanese on is shorter than an English syllable. Most English-language haiku journals publish poems of roughly 10 to 17 syllables and do not require 5-7-5, so treat the pattern as a target rather than a rule.
A kireji (切れ字) is a Japanese particle such as ya, kana or keri that splits a haiku into two parts and marks the pause between them. English has no direct equivalent, so writers use a dash, colon or full stop at the end of line one or line two — which is why every prompt here tells you where to put the cut.
Both are three-line short poems of the same length, but haiku carries a season word and turns on nature or the moment, while senryu drops the kigo and turns on human behaviour, often with irony. If your poem has no season word and its subject is people, it is probably a senryu.