Haiku Detector

Haiku Detector was a macOS app to find unintentional haiku in any text. You can still download it for free, though I have not updated it since 2015, so it seems to crash on recent versions of macOS — if you want to see what it can do, check posts with haiku found using it, on my Creative Output blog.

If you do have a version of macOS that can run it, type or paste text into the Haiku Detector window and it will find any sentences or groups of sentences that can be split into lines with five, seven, and five syllables and display them in the lower part of the window. Then you can copy individual haiku, copy them all (Copy All Haiku in the Edit menu) or save them to a file (Save in the File menu.)

Screenshot of Haiku Detector

Haiku Detector makes no attempt to check for kigo (season words.) In a future version I intend to add some kind of learning algorithm so that Haiku Detector can work out which sound best as haiku, based on the word classes at the line breaks.

You can read more about the history of Haiku Detector, and some of the haiku found using it, on my Creative Output blog.