#151 +II
The word “here” occurs 236 times across 29 chapters in Project Hail Mary. Only chapter 28 does not use it.
In Earth sections, it occurs 60 times in speech versus 5 times in narration. Speakers include Grace (21 times), Stratt (16 times), 3 times by each of Bob Redell, Leclerc, Sandra Elias, and Steve Hatch, 2 times by each of Dimitri, Dr. Lokken, and Ilyukhina, and 1 time by each of Dr. Browne, DuBois, Easton, Yáo, and the Waiter.
In Space sections, it occurs 54 times in speech and 117 times in narration. Grace speaks it 39 times and Rocky 15 times.
It is notable that narrative use is so much more common in Space sections than Earth sections.
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 “here” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
Okay, here goes.
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