How many syllables make up a Haiku?

How many syllables make up a Haiku?How many syllables make up a Haiku?
Oh yeargghh erm it's 17, 17 !How many syllables make up a Haiku?
In Japanese haiku have seventeen onji, or syllables, in groups of five, seven and five. The onji are less varied than our syllables (';Hello'; is two, but takes less time to say than ';thrust';, ';whinge'; or ';mourn';), though there is experimental evidence to show that the seven-syllable lines are said a little quicker and are exactly equivalent in time-value to the five syllable lines. All three lines are therefore, in one sense, of equal length, though the middle one is of greater density.


The line-lengths of five and seven onji are deeply rooted rhythmic units in Japanese, and have the highly memorable qualities of an English rhymed couplet. Slogans, advertising headlines, proverbs, witty sayings and all forms of traditional poetry are composed in these rhythmic units.





Translators have adopted different policies when searching for an English equivalent: some tried using rhyme (this did not catch on and is now a dead-end); some used a fuller four-line form which looked more like a native English quatrain, notably Noboyuki Yuasa who translated the Penguin Classics version of Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (this did not catch on either). There are two styles which have survived: a small group of translators and writers reproduce the Japanese syllabic pattern exactly in English; and a much larger group keep the translations as minimal as possible, on the grounds that the striking features of haiku are shortness and spareness.





Two syllables, sometimes one, in a Japanese haiku are often spent on a kireji, or ';cutting word,'; rendered in English by a punctuation mark. Fifteen or sixteen syllables remain. Some Japanese words may be shorter than ours, but on the whole they will be slightly less dense and the information in seventeen syllables can be translated in eight to twelve syllables, so there is a case for keeping English language haiku a little shorter than Japanese ones



It's 5 in the first line, 7 in the second, 5 in the third. 17 in total.





Seems pretty easy, but in Japanese it's a lot more limiting and a challenge because very few words exist of two of fewer syllables- not many people can write good ones!
5 7 5 i think