Other forms: finished, finishing, finishes
Finish means to get to the end of the thing you were doing. You finish your dinner, finish a book on the train, finish work at six and put your coat on.
The verb reaches further than that. You finish third in a race, and there the word is about position, not about stopping. You finish something off, finish with someone, and when a job is finished it needs nothing more. There is a noun too, in two flavours: the finish of a race, which is the last stretch and the line itself, and the finish on a table or a phone case, which is the surface it was given at the end — matt, glossy, brushed steel. One trap: finish takes -ing, never to. You finished reading the report. You did not finish to read it.
1verbfinishTo bring something to its end, or to come to an end.~60%
“We finished the painting just before the light went.”
synonyms: complete, end, conclude
2verbeatTo eat or drink all of something.~2%
“Finish your soup before it goes cold.”
3verbparticularTo be in a particular position when a race or competition ends.~27%
“She finished second by half a second.”
4nounlastThe last part of a race or contest, and the line where it ends.~2%
“It was a close finish, with three riders still together.”
5nounsurfaceThe surface given to a made object, and the way that surface looks and feels.~9%
“The doors come in a matt or a glossy finish.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: end, complete
Finish walks back through Middle English finishen and Old French finiss- to Latin fīniō, from fīnis, an end, a limit, a boundary line. That fīnis is still visible in final, finite and define — a definition is a fence drawn round a meaning.
Old French
finir
Middle English
finishen
English, today
finish
Built from
From Middle English finishen, from Old French finir. From Middle English finishen, finisshen, finischen, from Old French finiss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of finir, from Latin fīniō, from fīnis (“end, limit, border, boundary”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European dʰeygʷ- (“to stick, set up”) or from Proto-Indo-European bʰeyd- (“to split”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA