#38 IℓV
The word “time” occurs 413 times in Project Hail Mary.
It appears in all thirty chapters ranging in count from 4 occurrences in chapter 17 to 27 occurrences in chapter 29.
In the Earth sections, the word “time” appears 102 times. Grace uses it 37 times here as narrator and 14 times in direct speech. Stratt uses it 31 times. Dr. Lokken says it 6 times, Dimitri 4 times, and Ilyukhina 3 times. It is spoken once by Dr. Browne, Dr. Lamai, Leclerc, Marissa, Ms. Xi, Shapiro, and Steve Hatch.
In the Space sections, the word “time” appears 311 times. Grace uses it 256 times as narrator and 32 times in direct speech. Rocky says it 22 times and the Computer says it once.
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 “time” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
It is time
25.267