Haiku Generator

The Haiku Generator builds three lines in the classic 5-7-5 syllable pattern from a built-in word bank covering nine themes - Nature, Seasons, Zen, Urban, Ocean, Love, Technology, Space, and Food - plus a Custom mode you fill yourself. Each theme stores words bucketed by syllable count (1 through 5), where the higher buckets hold ready-made phrases such as 'a gentle breeze blows' or 'ones and zeros dancing' (both 5-syllable lines). When generating a 5-syllable line, the tool first rolls for one of those pre-written phrases (used when Math.random() exceeds 0.4); otherwise it assembles a line from grammatical templates - for example a 1-syllable adjective + 2-syllable noun + 2-syllable verb to hit 5, or 'the [noun] [verb]', drawing from shared ADJECTIVES and VERBS lists. The 7-syllable middle line has no pre-made phrases in the word bank (buckets only go to 5), so it is always built from templates like a 2-syllable adjective + 3-syllable noun + 2-syllable verb, falling back to a greedy word-concatenation if no template fits. Generation is purely client-side and random, so every press of Generate Haiku produces a fresh combination with no network calls or AI model behind it.

Syllable counting is done in the browser with a heuristic vowel-cluster counter rather than a pronunciation dictionary: any word of three letters or fewer counts as one syllable, otherwise it counts transitions into vowel groups (treating a, e, i, o, u, y as vowels), then subtracts one for a silent trailing 'e' (only when the count is already above 1) and adds one back for words ending in '-le' after a consonant (so 'gentle' reads as two). Because it is rule-based, unusual spellings can be miscounted, which is why each generated line is labeled with its own syllable total and the display shows the resulting pattern (for example 'Pattern: 5-7-5') so you can eyeball accuracy. The Custom theme reuses this same counter to sort your added words - when you type a word it is lowercased, deduplicated, and tagged with its computed syllable count, and only words matching the target count for a line are eligible during template building.

Beyond generation, the tool offers Shuffle, which regenerates just one randomly chosen line (keeping the 5 or 7 target appropriate to its position) rather than the whole poem, plus Copy (plain newline-joined text via the Clipboard API), Share (the Web Share API where available, falling back to clipboard with a ' - Generated Haiku' tag), and Save to an in-session history with Favorites. Note that saved haikus and favorites live in React state only, so they are lost on page reload rather than persisted to storage. The Image export draws the poem onto a 600x400 canvas with a fixed dark gradient background (#1a1a2e to #16213e), a decorative border, the theme emoji at the top, the lines set in italic 24px Georgia serif, the syllable pattern, and a watermark, then downloads it as a PNG named haiku-[timestamp].png - the same dark image regardless of the lighter theme color shown on screen.