The basmala opens 113 of the Quran's 114 chapters and is spoken before eating, driving, entering a house, beginning work, writing a letter and slaughtering an animal. It is by a very large margin the most frequently uttered sentence in Islam. The two names in it, al-Rahman and al-Rahim, come from the same root as the word for womb, which the commentators regularly point out. Calligraphically it is the single most reproduced phrase in Islamic art, and its absence from the ninth sura has generated commentary for a thousand years. Its practical function is to put an act under a name before performing it — including the act of killing an animal for food, where the tradition requires it to be said aloud, so that the taking of the life is never wordless.