#125 λVV̶
The word “heck” occurs 51 times in Project Hail Mary.
It occurs in 24 out of 30 chapters. It is only ever spoken by Grace as narrator or in direct speech.
It is used 12 times in Earth sections (3 times by the narrator and 9 times in direct speech).
It is used 39 times in Space sections (35 times by the narrator and 4 times in direct speech).
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 “heck” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
Why the heck not?!
23.090