Another common word used sparingly. Let’s see. If there are about 95,000 words in the work and 6,000 individual words, then each word is used an average of 16 times… Yet “finish” is used less than half of that. Let’s not make too much of that, but let’s do notice.

• 1.023 just about the time when Bilbo was finishing his second cake
• 1.066 And when you’ve finished, if any are whole,
• 7.088 Now perhaps we can finish this story
• 7.089 By the time the wizard had finished his tale
• 9.038 running round putting the finishing touches to the packing,
• 10.004 in fact finishing his other business
• 15.011 No sooner had he finished speaking