#44 IIV
The word “cylinder” occurs 69 times in Project Hail Mary (including in the plural, but not counting “subcylinders” or “cylindrical”).
The singular is used 61 times and the plural 8 times.
At least one of the two forms appears in twelve chapters, with 41 occurrences in chapters 7 and 8.
In the Earth sections, the word “cylinder” appears 5 times (only in the singular). Grace uses it 4 times here as narrator and Stratt uses it 1 time.
In the Space sections, the singular “cylinder” appears 56 times. Grace uses it 55 times as narrator and 1 time in direct speech. The plural “cylinders” is only used by Grace as narrator.
Rocky never uses the word in either form.
In the novel, the term variously refers to a metal water container on the ship, the shape the second room on the ship is not, the container (marked образец) the astrophage sample is in (5 times), the shape of various parts of the Hail Mary itself, the “Blip-B” xenon containers sent by Rocky in Chapter 7 (25 times) and Chapter 8 (16 times), the Eridian clock, the launch propulsion for the beetles, and various chemistry supplies on the Hail Mary.
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 “cylinder” or “cylinders” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
It’s a cylinder (man, these people like cylinders)
10.156