Most haiku practitioners rely on a saijiki. It usually takes a beginner five or six years to learn how to identify and use season-words properly. In the process, the consciousness of seasonal transition and its significance is deepened, and the student is introduced to a new and alluring realm of poetry. Saijiki are available in pocket edition, usually of five to six hundred pages. These contain the words that occur most frequently, usually limited to about fifteen hundred.
Larger books contain two or three times that number.