WotD Challenge Roundup: The Haiku Edition

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog. This week we honored National Haiku Poetry Day by giving you the option to tweet the words of the day in “twaiku.” Non-twaikus were accepted as well.

Here are our favorites:

Thanks to everyone for playing! Remember, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

This Week’s WotD Challenge: Haikus

You may be familiar with our weekly Word of the Day (WotD) Perfect Tweet challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog. This week for National Haiku Poetry Day, we invite you to tweet the words of the day in haiku, or twaiku, as some might say.

As you know, a haiku is a Japanese form of poetry made up of “three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons.” The word comes from the Japanese hai, “amusement,” plus ku, “sentence.” A senryu is a haiku that’s humorous or satirical, and is named for poet Senryu Karai who popularized the genre in the 18th century.

We love this haiku from Japanese Zen poet Matsuo Basho:

The temple bell stops.
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

If you can fit your haiku in one tweet, great! If not, we ask that you number your tweets for easy reading. And of course you have the option to use this week’s words in regular sentences too if you’re not a poet and you know it.

Happy haiku-ing!

Celebratory Haiku!

In our “welcome to Wordnik!” emails we told folks that “we’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, or celebratory haiku.” We’ve gotten oodles of great comments and helpful suggestions, but these brave and lovely souls took us up on the haiku part:


Palimpsests reborn!
Trails of words come slithering
through the intertubes.


—Tom W. (Thosh) (who found us via Making Light, woot!)


Wordnik.com rocks.
Discovering all the words
With my help. Yippee!


—Glenn Atkinson


mental espresso
scrabble serendipity
wordniks don’t mind beta


Jay Levin


and this funny (if not quite polite) offering:


Neologisms
Contextually defined
Bite me, OED


—Hillary Israeli, who said “sorry for being crude, but hey-I’m excited about wordnik!”


(We hope our friends at the OED can take a joke.)


And this one, from Emily Ng, just came in this morning!


Hello Dear Wordnik,
i shall spend countless hours,
Getting lost in words.


Got a celebratory haiku of your own? Feel free to leave it in the comments.