New words every day
Write a haiku using all three of today's words. Five beats in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third. Everybody gets the same three.
Today's three words
Use all three in a haiku \u2014 five beats, then seven, then five. The small number is how many beats each word takes. Plurals count.
New words tomorrow. Same three for everybody, everywhere.
Say the line out loud
A beat is a clap. Beau-ti-ful is three. The counter follows as you type, so you can hear and see at the same time.
Get all three words in
Any line, any order. Plurals count — if the word is "pebble", "pebbles" is fine.
Five, seven, five
When a line lands, it turns green. When all three do and every word is in, you have it.
Come back tomorrow
New words at midnight, the same three for everybody. There are 100,548 possible trios, so nobody will see a repeat this century.
Two things get checked, and only two: whether the beats are right, and whether the three words are there. Both are countable.
Whether the haiku is any good is not countable, and a score out of ten would be a machine pretending. The constraint is the game. The poem is yours.
A blank page and the instruction “write a haiku” is the hardest version of this. Three words you did not choose give you somewhere to start, and force a connection you would not have made on your own — which is most of what the form is for.
The words come from three pools: something from nature, something from the weather or sky, and something ordinary and human. That mix is deliberate. A haiku traditionally puts a season beside a small specific moment, and lotus, shower, letter gives you both halves before you have written a word.
Beats are counted from real pronunciations rather than guessed from spelling, which matters more than it sounds: the usual method — count the vowel groups, drop a silent e — is wrong on one word in six. Poem is two beats. Choir is two. Rhythm is two, and its second beat has no vowel in it at all.
Words that people genuinely say two ways are kept out of the daily three — spring is one beat to some and two to others, and a puzzle cannot turn on that. If you want to test yourself on the awkward ones, the syllable quiz is ten of them against the clock.
Stuck for a word that fits the beat? The rhyme finder sorts its answers by how many beats each one takes, and counts whole lines of your own. For a faster game, the daily blitz is seven letters and sixty seconds.
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