#72 Vℓℓ
The word “star” occurs 121 times in Project Hail Mary (including in the plural).
The singular is used 81 times and the plural 40 times.
In the Earth sections, the word “star” appears 23 times in the singular and 14 times in the plural. It used in either form by Dr. Lokken 2 times, Ms. Xi 3 times, Steve Hatch 1 time, Stratt 15 times, and Grace 14 times in direct speech and 2 times as narrator.
In the Space sections, the word “star” appears 58 times in the singular and 26 times in the plural. Grace uses either form 65 times as narrator and 12 times in direct speech. Rocky uses either form 7 times.
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 “star” or “stars” (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
All I see is stars in the distance.
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