WARNING!

This website contains spoilers for Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.
It is recommended you read the book before exploring this site.

#63 I+λ

The word “clock” occurs 47 times in Project Hail Mary (including in the plural but not counting “o’clock”, “clockwise”, or “counterclockwise”).

The singular is used 46 times and the plural 1 time.

In the Earth sections, the word “clock” appears just 2 times (both in the singular). Both times it is used by the narrator.

In the Space sections, the word “clock” appears 44 times in the singular and 1 time in the plural. Grace uses the singular 38 times as narrator and 5 times in direct speech. He uses the plural 1 time as narrator. Rocky never uses the word. The Computer uses it 1 time.

Here’s a visualization of the relative frequencies across all sections and chapters of the book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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 “clock” or “clocks” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).

every lab needs an analog clock

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