#6 Iℓ
Words beginning with “scien-” occur 187 times in Project Hail Mary.
The word “science” occurs 97 times; “scientists” occurs 38 times; “scientific” occurs 31 times; “scientist” occurs 19 times; “sciences” occurs 1 time; and “sciencing” occurs 1 time (see the quote below).
Interestingly, the plural “scientists” is used 24 times on Earth versus 14 times in Space. The singular “scientist” is used 8 times on Earth versus 11 times in Space.
The “scien-” words are spoken on Earth once by each of Dimitri, Justice Spencer, Ms. Xi, Sandra Elias, and Yáo; Dr. Lokken and Leclerc use them twice, Stratt 26 times, Grace 23 times in direct speech and 27 times as narrator.
In Space, Rocky says them 28 times, Grace 14 times in direct speech and 60 times as narrator.
Here’s a visualization of the relative frequencies across all sections and chapters of the book.
Note the peak at the end of Chapter 10.
This is because the section 10.181–10.184 is just four paragraphs long yet has three occurrences of a “scien-” word.
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 “scien-” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
I’ve been mad sciencing some inventions in the lab.
20.107