#120 λVℓ
Words formed with tau occurs 338 times in Project Hail Mary.
“taumoeba” occurs 192 times and “tau” 107 times but we also get “taulight” 8 times, “tauset” 1 time, “taumoebas” 1 time and the following variants:
- “taumoeba-82.5” 16 times
- “taumoeba-80” 4 times
- “taumoeba-35” 3 times
- “taumoeba-06” 2 times
- “taumoeba-52” 1 time
- “taumoeba-62” 1 time
- “taumoeba-86” 1 time
- “taumoeba-78” 1 time
On Earth, only “tau” itself is found (12 times), spoken 1 time by Dr. Lokken, Grace, Steve Hatch, and the narrator; and 4 times by each of Ms. Xi and Stratt.
“Taulight”, ”tauset”, and “taumoebas” are only used by the narrator in the Space sections and all other usages are split between the narrator, Grace, and Rocky.
Here’s a visualization of the relative frequencies across all sections and chapters of the book.
Each coloured bar represents a section and is colour-coded for Earth sections (green) and Space sections (purple).
The grey bars represent the chapters, which are marked with ticks and numbers.
The y-axis is the relative frequency, i.e. the proportion of tokens in that section (or chapter) that match tau-words (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
Ohhhh…that’s what the lowercase t is on the Hail Mary crest. It’s a tau
06.053