Kigo: The Season Word List for Haiku, by Season and Category

Haiku craft · Season words · Updated 2026-07-22

A kigo is a season word: a fixed image that tells a haiku's reader what time of year it is without the poem ever naming the month. Traditional haiku expects one, and Japanese poets pick it from a saijiki, a season-word almanac that sorts kigo into four seasons plus New Year and then into seven standard categories - the season, the heavens, the earth, humanity, observances, animals, and plants.

The chart below is a starter list you can actually write from, drawn from the season words that appear in most major saijiki. It also fixes the thing that trips up every English-language writer first: the traditional Japanese seasons do not line up with the Western calendar. Spring begins around 4 February, not in March.

How big is a real saijiki?

Larger than you expect. The five-volume Nihon Dai Saijiki (1981-83), on which the critic Yamamoto Kenkichi served as a senior editor, lists some 16,000 season words. Yamamoto also selected 500 of those as the essential core; that selection, translated into English by Kris Young Kondo and William J. Higginson as The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words and hosted by the Haiku Foundation, is still the standard starting point for non-Japanese poets.

So there is no single official kigo list, and there is no governing body that certifies one. A saijiki is an editorial work, and different editors place the same word differently. What is stable is the structure: four seasons plus New Year, seven categories inside each, and an early / mid / late marking on words that belong to only part of a season.

Traditional Japanese seasons vs the Western calendar

The consequence is that the solstices and equinoxes sit in the middle of a Japanese season rather than at its start. Midsummer's day really is mid-summer. Snow is a winter kigo but koharubiyori, the mild spell English calls Indian summer, is an early-winter one. And a cicada poem written on 10 August is an autumn poem, not a summer one, because autumn opened two days earlier.

Each season then splits into thirds, following the old lunar months. Spring is the worked example: early spring runs 4 February - 5 March, mid-spring 6 March - 4 April, and late spring 5 April - 5 May. That is why plum blossom (ume) is early spring and cherry blossom (sakura) is late spring, roughly two lunar months apart, even though both are simply "spring flowers" in English.

Kigo reference chart by season and category

Choosing a kigo that earns its line

• Pick one, not two. A haiku carrying both sakura and semi has two seasons fighting over seventeen sounds. Renku practice treats a doubled season word as an error, and it reads as one in a standalone haiku too.
• Prefer the narrow word. "Autumn" is a category header. Hatsu-momiji, the first colored leaves, dates the poem to a fortnight and gives the reader an image at the same time.
• Let it do the work of a whole line. If the kigo is yuki and you also write "cold" and "white", you have spent two-thirds of the poem restating the season word.
• Localise honestly. Cherry blossom is not late spring in Reykjavik or Auckland. The Yuki Teikei Haiku Society's season word list, built for Northern California, is the standard model for adapting a saijiki to a place that is not Kyoto.

Read a season word before you write one. Haiku puts a new poem on your Home Screen and Lock Screen every morning through a WidgetKit widget, and its Collections let you browse 3,000+ poems by era, theme, mood, or form - including haiku itself. Reading a month of nature poems is the fastest way to learn which images carry a season. No account, no sign-in, and everything stays on your device. Download Haiku: Daily Poems & Poetry on the App Store.

Building your own season word habit

Keeping a personal saijiki is ordinary practice: a running note of what you actually saw and when, so next year's poems draw on your own weather rather than a translated list. Haiku helps with the input side of that habit. The daily widget delivers one poem a morning without asking for your attention twice, long-pressing a line saves it to your highlights, and the reading streak keeps the ritual going without turning into a notification. Browse the haiku form in Collections, read the classics of Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Shiki, and note which season word each one leans on - most of them lean on exactly one.

Frequently asked questions

What is a kigo in haiku?

A kigo is a season word: an image with an agreed seasonal meaning, such as cherry blossom for late spring or cicada for late summer. Traditional haiku includes one, and it does the work of telling the reader when the poem happens without the poem naming a date.

How many kigo are there?

There is no fixed count, because a saijiki is an editorial work rather than an official register. The five-volume Nihon Dai Saijiki lists roughly 16,000. Yamamoto Kenkichi's widely used core selection narrows that to 500.

Does a haiku have to have a season word?

In traditional Japanese practice, yes. Modern practice is split: seasonless (muki) haiku is accepted by many Japanese and most English-language journals, and some saijiki now include a muki section. If you are writing in the classical mode, include one.

When does spring start for haiku?

Around 4 February, at the solar term risshun, and it runs to about 5 May. The traditional haiku calendar puts the equinoxes and solstices in the middle of each season rather than at the start, so the boundaries sit roughly six weeks earlier than the Western meteorological ones.

Keep reading

• Haiku Syllables: Does a Haiku Have to Be 5-7-5?
• Kireji: The Cutting Word in Haiku and How to Do It in English
• Famous Haiku Poems: The Classics by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki