Help with Searching the Haiku Dictionary

     In the search box enter a single character or a word or words in English or Rōmaji or Japanese. Click on "Submit Query." The search may take a short time. The results will be returned to you in a new window. Note that your search term is highlighted in red.

     If your search term appears in a brief entry, the entire brief entry will be displayed in the seach results. Similarly, if the term appears in a full entry, the entire full entry is displayed. If the search term appears in both a brief entry and the corresponding full entry, only the full entry is displayed in the search results.

     Results are arranged in the same order as the brief and full entries: by season, and within seasons by categories (The Season, The Heavens, The Earth, etc.)

     You can limit your search to either brief or long entries by selecting "Brief entries only" or "Long entries only" in the "within" pull-down menu. You can also limit your search to the haiku in the long entries. This option is useful, for example, for searching for the names of poets whose haiku are included in the long entries.

     The search finds exactly the string of characters that you input. For example, if you search for the string "dog" (without the quotation marks), you will retrieve entries that include both "dog" and "dogs," as well as "hina dōgu." If you search for the romanized word for dog, "inu" (without the quotation marks), you will get a large number of entries in which "inu" is part of verbs. You can limit the search by leaving a blank space before and after "inu" in the search form. If you do this, the search returns only a few instances in which "inu" means dog. If you search for a word in quotation marks, you are likely not to get any hits, because the search is trying to find cases of your word enclosed in quotation marks in the actual entries.